Persuasion
by cuppacuppajoe
Summary: It was the Austen of second chances.
1. Chapter 1

Prelude

Her fingers skimmed through the books in her bedroom shelf, light but lingering, as one might skim hot bathwater on a cold evening. She was already looking forward to diving deep. So what shall it be tonight? Her head—still wrapped snugly in its burgundy wool cap, for she had walked straight to the shelf upon entering her still dark apartment—tilted to the left as she attempted to make out the faded letters on the cracked spines of her dog-eared, much abused books. No matter that she couldn't read the titles anymore, for she knew these volumes by heart. Knew them since she was 12 years old. The merit and meaning of the words changed as she read each one at least a dozen times over the years, but never had Jane's words hold so much promised solace as they did tonight. Tonight, 17 years later at the age of 29.

_Mr. Darcy? _

Her index finger paused at the top of the book, lightly pinched when it caught itself between the tightly packed pages. Her eyes shut of their own accord, as an image of a man with his own brand and mix of Darcy-like arrogance, conceit, pride—but also of wit, integrity, and honesty—entered unbidden in her mind. (This man was blonde, though, not dark haired.) His smile was the same as she remembered it seven years before. The infectious kind, the one that tugged at the corner of her own lips; the infuriariting kind, the one that made her neck and face flushed and warm. (He smiled at everyone else it seemed, but not at her, or so she imagined. And Darcy, well, he hardly smiled at all. That should put this foolish comparison to a close.)

This place is amazing, her boyfriend David had exclaimed, staring up at the ceiling bedecked with its painted host of cherubim and seraphim. And is that…is that a Velasquez? Well, yes, yes it is, imagine that, she had murmured back.

_Who wouldn't want to be mistress of Pemberley?_

Well Lizzy didn't, she snapped at herself, finally shaking her chin-length hair loose from her cap. She stared at the brown leather book spine in defiance. Dropping her chin a little, she amended, well _not at first…_

_You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it. I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry._

No. It wasn't like that at all. He would be—_was_—the first man, in fact. It was the enterprise of marriage itself that was furthest from her mind, her life, at 22. She cleared her throat in an attempt to break the web of memory threading its way around her heart, around that finger still touching the spine of the book in question.

She pushed the volume further into the recesses of her shelf, until it was deeply secluded in the shadows of its fellow Austens. She will not read about a rejected marriage proposal. Not tonight. Even though Lizzy and Darcy do end up happy…well, not tonight. It was, in turns, too close and too far from the mark.

Oh, just pick something, for heaven's sake! She admonished herself, unwinding her scarf and flinging it on her bed. She was tired but too wound up from the evening's events to sleep on her own. Let the lovely Miss Jane read her to sleep, distract her with the sounds of dancing and mothers and horse-drawn carriages. Distract me, lull me to dreamless sleep, she very nearly begged, as she looked wonderingly at the hand he had grasped so firmly that evening, shaking it just as he did David's, a stranger to him.

The hand reached out blindly on the shelf, picking a volume at random. A slim one, easily gripped and thrown on the bedspread. It wasn't until she had showered and changed to pajamas, not until she was burrowed under her covers with only her bedside lamp casting an orange glow about her room, did she realize what book she had picked. Or rather, what chance had picked for her.

_Persuasion._

Her hand shook slightly as she proceeded, as if without care, to turn back the cover and read the description of the plot written on the flap at the back. (She had memorized it by now, of course, but habits die hard.) Satisfied that the small introductory ritual was done, she began to read, and gratefully fell asleep with the hand he had touched tucked under her cheek. Anne Elliot was in her dreams. Anne Elliot who had been persuaded to spurn her true love, only to be granted a second chance, seven years later.

_A story of second chances, the most somber—but romantic—of Jane Austen's novels. _(So the description written on the flap at the back read.)

It had been too late to return the book to the shelf, she convinced herself, too late to have replaced it with the Gothic silliness of _Northanger Abbey_.

Second chances? No. Too late for that, too. It was an engagement party she and David had attended, after all, in that Pemberley in Hartford.


	2. Chapter 2

_Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to _throw herself away_ at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession_; _would be, indeed, a _throwing away_… Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune; or rather sunk by him into a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependence! ( Chapter IV)_

i.

Some things had changed in the life and ways of Rory Gilmore since graduating from Yale and refusing Logan Huntzberger's marriage proposal seven years ago.

She ate the occasional fruit, for one, and did the occasional run in Central Park (a brisk walk, more like, which invariably ended prematurely with her lying on the grass with book in hand). She wasn't one to wait and see if she had her mother's possibly alien metabolism. And she had come to love walking.

For another, she dated.

And truth be told, she had become quite good at it, quite adept at the drinks-and-dinner repartee, the art of hooking up but not digging deep. Once, she had caught herself (flirtatiously? nervously?) twirling a coil of her hair around her finger while having a drink with Samuel Mendez (but with some embarrasment, tucking her finger back into her fist as soon as she realized). Her mother alternately felt proud and uneasy at the social development of her late blooming little circus freak.

But truth be told, after seven years and a near-serious relationship that succumbed at seven months (in year four), Rory found it old and tiresome. While her friends actively snapped at every opportunity—every hope—to enter into _the_ relationship, to her, going out with virtual strangers became an exertion of real, physical effort. (Coming home from such evenings, her back and abdominal muscles felt like she had done several hundred crunches, which she had never actually done in her entire life.) And for what? She learned of the good and the bad in men and in sex, but at the end of the day, she would still rather curl up in her flannel pjs and spend a nostalgic night with reruns of _The Office_. At least her abs seemed to benefit from all the clenching it bore on especially trying evenings.

She stopped berating herself for this, stopped thinking of herself as odd and accepted that perhaps she would always be a social misfit of sorts. She also stopped wondering why no man had come along that could make her feel that this social exercise was worth pursuing. Or why no man had yet come along that could make her _feel_, period. At her age, she reasoned once to Lorelai, perhaps it was normal to find the romantic idealism of youth slipping away, as a good dose of Paris-like pessimism crept in to take its place. (Was she ever a romantic idealist?)

She devoted herself ever more fully to her _dream job_ as reporter at _The New York Times_, persuading herself that this was her life—a good enough life, close enough to her _dream life. _The life she _did not throw away_ at 22.

Dating, moreover, simply brought home the point in a most nagging manner that she did not have anyone. And that, if she were honest with herself, she did miss. Not _anyone_ in particular—of course not. She missed being in a relationship, is what it was, missed being part of a pair, one of two, seeing her black leather pumps next to black leather loafers, her blue toothbrush next to his green (it was green, if her memory serves her right). To have someone laugh or respond with a witty comeback at her obscure references to _Madame Bovary_ or _The 40 Year-Old Virgin _(which had fallen flat with Samuel Mendez, who neither watched Apatow nor read Flaubert. She had to stop seeing him.) To be so sensitized to someone's touch as to feel it through to her bones. She had not felt that way—to be so desiring and so desirable—in seven years.

Nearly every man fell short. Ridiculous! her grandmother had railed, time and again, as every socially-appropriate match arranged by Emily did not flourish beyond the second date (if Rory was being polite; otherwise, the affair usually ended at the first). He (they) just wasn't intelligent enough. Or funny enough. Or sweet enough. Not the right smile. And the hair was off. (She did find herself slightly more partial to blondes, but refused to reflect on why that was so. She's become a great walker, and a bit more partial to tea, and so what?) And the toothbrush, should she happen to discover, upsettingly never turned out to be green.

She had a pretty framed photograph on her desk, of two dark-haired blue-eyed women on the grass with a dark-haired blue-eyed toddler on the lap of the younger. _Your son is adorable_, co-workers would say automatically, as they perched on the edge of her table and glanced at the picture. Sometimes she corrected them. Sometimes she didn't. The strangeness of her 46 year-old mother having a little boy was not lost on her 29 year-old self, as was the achiness of having a little boy who was not hers bouncing on her lap. _At your age, your mother had a 13 year-old daughter,_ Emily once said caustically at dinner. Coming from her, that too was ironic and strange and achy. Why should her life be so demarcated by social norms for age and status? _Have a relationship, a child, at 29. (Don't get married at 23.)_

And so she continued to date. But with disembodied detachment, as she is while at the supermarket picking out the necessary, tolerable piece of anti-oxidant fruit to eat at least once a day.

Then one evening four months ago, David Monroe came along, at Emily's nth find-Rory-a-suitable-mate fete. Blonde, intelligent, _nice_, and a pair of warm enough arms to wake up to in this winter season. He will do. She felt respectable having a _relationship_ at 29. In the eyes of her grandmother and the rest of _society_, at least, her sexuality, personality, and other oddities will no longer be questioned. He will save her from dating.

Unfortunately, he could not save her after all. Her carefully cultivated okay-ness with the life she did not throw away was about to crumble with David's close connection with one Louisa Monroe. She could not have known that what she _had_ thrown away seven years ago was about to come back. And that her heart cannot be persuaded to keep still, keep itself from becoming completely undone, by his return.

ii.

There are things that had not changed in the life and ways of Rory Gilmore since graduating from Yale and refusing Logan Huntzberger's marriage proposal seven years ago.

She still ate Pop Tarts for breakfast. At times, for dinner.

And she still talked to her mother everyday. This morning's call was especially crucial to Rory's job. Her ability to finish reading, editing, and writing the drafts crammed on her desktop hinged on her finally making a decision once and for all.

"What do you think I should do?" she asked Lorelai plaintively. (Some things had not changed, see.)

"I really can't tell you, hon," Lorelai replied in a distant voice, drowned by a cacophony of children's loud and high-pitched voices in the background. "What do you want to do? You know if you don't want to go, you could always say you have babysitting duty with your slavedriver of a mother—your poor forty-six-year-old-but-still-hot-mother—who is saddled with a five year-old child precisely because she was so freakin' hot. That should do the trick. I can't believe you'll be in Hartford and not here, anyway."

"I don't know what I should do…or want to do. I wouldn't ask your opinion if I knew," Rory groaned, impatient. "Hey, is that the play date you're having for Ian?" she asked, referring to the noise, and smiling when an off-key chorus of "Hi, Rory!" jarred in her ear.

"Okay, remember when you were 8 and you asked me whether you should pick the brown-haired doll or the yellow-haired doll with the birthday money your Grandmother sent you and I said you should get the brown-haired doll because it kind of looked like you, when what you really, really wanted was the red-haired doll because then you could pretend it was Anne of Green Gables? We bought that brown-haired doll and you never played with it. You did sulk for a good day and a half, too."

"Dolls? You bring up my 36-hour obsession with the red-haired doll?" Rory snapped.

"Top of mind. Ian had been asking why he had to keep playing with your brown-haired doll."

"Give gender equality a rest, Mom. How much longer til you give him his frogs and snails and puppy dogs' tails?"

"I'm just trying to give my two children, whom I love dearly and equally, the same growth experiences," Lorelai reasoned unconvincingly. "Anyway, until his 6th birthday party. Until then, he'll just have to continue training the brown-haired doll for Steve and Kwan's WWE matches. At least some child is finally playing with the poor thing."

"I do remember her, the red one," Rory relented, allowing herself a brief reminisce. "Ugly, but red-haired. It just didn't seem right for me to buy an ugly doll with Grandma's money, even given the literary allusion to L.M. Montgomery," she sighed wistfully. "But we need to focus here," she reprimanded her mother and herself.

"But I was on-topic," Lorelai huffed. "My maternal pearls of wisdom have rolled underfoot and gone unappreciated yet again. The moral of little Red's story is, you _do_ know what you want, sweetie. Really. And the second moral is, you sulk when you don't do it or get it. Sulking and wallowing inside for days on end…or at least for 36 hours, though ever gracious about things for the rest of the world to see. Now this engagement party…"

"Hm…so, uh…the engagement party is…the red-haired doll?" Rory muttered dubiously.

"The party may be the brown-haired doll, or the red-haired doll, and Emily is David—or whoever—so there!" Lorelai said, triumphantly, shouting "Steve and Ian, get off of Kwan this instant! And go lick that chocolate syrup off your faces…good boys!"

Then, without missing a beat, she added, "What I'm saying is that deep down you may really, really want to go, and by not going, you'll wallow in regret for the rest of your days. Or you may really not want to go, and by going, you'll wallow in regret for the…"

"I do appreciate the insight into my indecisiveness and eagerness to please, Ms. Anna Freud," Rory interrupted curtly. "I ask you one simple question, Mom. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it," she followed on cue. _And let's put these past four sleepless, stupid nights to an end._

"If it was so simple, then why are you agonizing over it so much?"

"I'm not agonizing." _It's been _five_ sleepless, stupid nights, not four,_ she corrected herself.

"Yes, you are. I can see you right now. You're rubbing your fingers against your forehead, chewing your bottom lip, agonizing, agonizing…"

Rory promptly put her hand down and twiddled a pencil to keep it busy. "I'm not agonizing…just…wondering. If it's okay, you know? Wondering if it would be okay with everyone…him and his fiancee…that I'm there." She said this in a small voice. _Really, why would anyone care she was there?_

"Hm," Lorelai murmured meditatively. "I'd wonder too. I'd wonder how he looks now. You know if it were me, I'd go just to see. Maybe his hairline has receded. Maybe he's growing a paunch. A wart on his nose."

"Or maybe he's just as devastatingly handsome and reeking with charm, as ever," Rory retorted drily. She's seen his photos every now and then, in the news; every now and then, in her mind.

"Devastatingly handsome?!? Reeking?" Lorelai gasped. "Tell me you've been reading the Kathleen Woodiwiss with a half-naked Fabio on the cover."

"Well he was," Rory said a tad defensively. "Maybe not devastatingly, but um, quite."

"And you're afraid because his devastatingly handsome looks will persuade you to rip out your bodice and pour your heart out of your heaving bosom."

Rory cringed. "It's really about time to return _The Flame and the Flower_ to Babette, you know. Unfortunately, my ripped bodice and dripping bosom would go to waste as he's getting married, which is the whole point of this…this…decision. I mean, it might be awkward. Is there some social rule that says I should or I shouldn't go? Or am I stupid for thinking it might be awkward?" _Seven years. God, so stupid._

"You mean _heaving_ bosom, dear. She is agonizing…agonizing…" Lorelai breathed heavily on the other side of the phone. She began to hum _Farmer in the Dell_ along with Ian's playgroup.

"David wants me to go; I really should go, for him. He's so eager for me to meet his favorite cousin, the effervescent Louisa Monroe…and so eager for me to meet her fiance, the amazing Logan Huntzberger!" she half-laughed incredulously.

"_Effervescent_? She sounds like bubbly. And you know, a bit of bubbly is your best friend at that party."

"Announcing the engagement of the _effervescent_ 23-year-old Louisa Monroe, daughter of hotel magnate Charles V. Monroe and New York socialite and humanitarian Vanessa Monroe, to Logan Huntzberger, erstwhile CEO of the Huntzberger Publishing Group in Western Europe, and now Chairman of HPG in the United States," Rory read aloud from last week's edition of _The Times_ Style section. Unaccountably, it was still there, lying on her desk. She rolled it carefully, along with her neat little Pro-Con list, and slipped it quietly in the trash can by her feet. There.

"Sounds like a match made in heaven," Lorelai muttered, with a shudder that Rory wouldn't see. "Just what the Huntzbergers ordered." There was the briefest moment of awkward silence, during which Rory and Lorelai remembered how Rory was _not_ what the Huntzbergers ordered.

"So David knows. Of course…?" Lorelai hedged. "He knows that you know more about Logan than he does or ever will. Hey, maybe you know more than the girl, even. She sounds like she might have a purity pledge, so in among these virginal socialites. You could give her notes on the hot and heavy."

"Ugh, stop it." _Logan really liked it when I pressed my tongue against the pulse point on his neck._ She shook her head so hard to be rid of the unbidden thought she made it spin. "Of course David knows. Well…" Rory amended, rifling through what she managed to reveal to him. "…part of it."

"Which part?"

"The important parts…that Logan and I, uh, knew each other from Yale."

"Uh-huh. You _knew_ each other, all right. Down to whether he wore boxers or briefs, left the toilet seat up, and drooled while he slept. That can't be all you told him, Rory."

"I said we knew each other, and we went out for a while."

"A while, meaning 3 years."

"Time is relative. It was 7 long years ago, ergo, 3 years count as _a while_," Rory bit out tersely.

"Guess so, Einstein. While Jesus said, and I quote, 'the truth shall set you free'."

"I wasn't lying. What else should I have said? That oh, and by the way, it was pretty serious and he did ask me to marry him but I turned down his proposal? Totally unnecessary. Logan and I are practically strangers. It would have ruined the whole….engagement thingy that David has been so excited about." It would have marred the lovely, cream colored invitation with its intricate calligraphy.

_You are cordially invited to cocktails to celebrate the happy occasion of the engagement of Louisa Monroe to Logan Huntzberger._

That's what it said, in black cursive, so expensive as to be definitive. A happy occasion it is, then. Which goes perfectly well with the effervescent bride-to-be, though not with the inexplicable scratchy sensation at the back of Rory's throat. They were practically strangers...

Lorelai turned the tables and proceeded to badger Rory for her opinion on Ian's upcoming space-themed birthday party. _(Should I still include Pluto in the décor? I feel sorry for the poor little minor planet.)_ Clearly, the topic had run its course and Rory would just have to decide on her own.

She was calmer, though, when she hung up the phone and decidedly awakened her computer from its sleep. And like a revelatory sign, there was David on her IM window:

what time shd i pick u up

There really was no need for any more of this fuss and indecision; of course she would go. If she didn't, it might mean that she is giving more weight and meaning to this event—this _man_—than was warranted. If she didn't, she wouldn't be able to show David—show _him_—that she was happy, the loss muted and the pain made distant by these last seven years that they heard not a thing from each other. If she didn't go, she wouldn't be able to see for herself whether he was happy these last seven years, without her.

_More than seven years were gone since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close; and time had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him,--but she had been too dependent on time alone; no aid had been given in change of place…No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. ( Chapter IV)_


	3. Chapter 3

_He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shown a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity. ( Chapter VII) _

i.

He looked out from his window at the sea of white froth, so thick it seemed you could walk on it. Except they were merely clouds—water, air, vapor. He imagined himself surfing on the gray-white swells, orange where the setting sun touched. Coasting in cloud froth, and then—nothing. _Falling through._ His heart quickened. That's how he felt. Conveniently suspended in time and space the last six hours—the last four years—his former life in Yale and Hartford was now literally rushing up to meet his present life as the plane lurched to descend, bearing him, luggage, and fiancee. And his heartbeat quickened—from excitement, anticipation, or nervousness, he wasn't sure. (Nervous, though? _He?_) It was probably the usual bout of nausea he felt in the moments just before touchdown, something he never got over despite his constant travel and occasional jumping off of planes.

Logan Huntzberger glanced down at the blonde head leaning against his shoulder. _How can she sleep through this?_ he wondered, as the aircraft lurched yet again. But that's how she was. Louisa remained unruffled through anything, from spilled wine (whose stains she adroitly removes) and two-hour flight delays (during which she would strike up a lifelong friendship with the person seated next to her). She'll no doubt straighten up once they've landed, pull her hair into an artless twist, and spring up to retrieve her bag from the overhead bin with nary a greenish tinge on her cheek.

She reminded him of…some bird (thanks to David Attenborough who, in dulcet British accent, narrated _The Life of Birds_ in Logan's in-flight BBC feature). In her grace, with her endless legs and wispy pale-blondeness; with her bird-like efficiency, pecking at this and that, flitting here and there _just so_. In her bird-like chirpiness, which, on good days, made him laugh, while on bad days, tested him sorely. (At times, she reminded him of his mother, but he tried extremely hard to keep those thoughts as infrequent as possible. She reminded him, too, of Colin's third stepmother imprinted in his hormonal 13 year-old brain, but that's another story.) They've been together for six months, engaged for two weeks, and a _bird_ was the best metaphor he can come up with. Not even any specific species of bird. _Damn_, he realized. He really should get better at this, start thinking of her as his soulmate, his world, or something appropriately maudlin. But when was the last time he thought of anyone as _his world?_

Where Logan comes from, being soulmates was not a prerequisite to marriage, so it doesn't matter. What matters is that his mother, father, sister, nieces, colleagues, and every other blueblood in the Eastern seaboard loved Louisa like a Stepford wife they might have created themselves. _Logan and Louisa_ rolled off the tongue nearly as easily as TomKat or Brangelina (and both couples still together, to boot).To be fair, Logan believed he loved her too. In a way. (In a non-soulmate, non-_Jerry Maguire_ way. But in some way.)

There was a time when he thought of her type as the least likely he would end up with. Because there was _one_ specific type he had wanted to marry—a soulmate type—in fact. But that was seven years ago, and it didn't go down well, to put it mildly. Truth be told, it was a veritable disaster that flung him into some life-sucking vortex of angry, self-pitying, booze-glutted hell (more commonly known as depression, apparently). Unfortunately, California just wasn't far enough, his dime-a-dozen Internet start-up just not lucrative enough, and his heart not strong enough for him to withstand the aftermath of one Rory Gilmore turning down the prospect of a life spent with him. He took up base-jumping again, the illegal, reckless sort, naturally. And as he flew off of Yosemite's El Capitan one warm afternoon in August, he found himself thinking that he wouldn't mind if he died. That it might actually be fucking cool if he plunged headlong to the rocks below and re-broke his ribs, repunctured his lungs, and disappeared into oblivion. Just…_enough_ of this. What's the point? He didn't have anything or anyone to deploy his parachute for.

He couldn't, though. _Enough_, the wind screamed in his ears, tugged at his hair as if to provide some resistance as he free-fell through the sky. Enough of this misery; _let it go_. He was _only_ 26, (_already_ 26). Perhaps a trace of Thoreau's marrow-yet-to-be-sucked finally, finally manifested itself as he belatedly fumbled with the pin of his chute. He threw up all over himself when he came down; he was unbroken but horribly in need of repair. Still trying to regain his bearings, he got word not one hour later that his grandfather—for whom he felt more begrudging affection than his own father—had died. All in all, it was a hell of a cathartic landing.

As such death-defying, life-defining moments go, Logan swore that he will never again allow himself to sink (to fall) to such depths. Not for anyone. And as he took to the task of becoming himself again, he found it helpful to think of his life in _pre-R_ and _post-R_ terms, writing off the middle as a temporary snafu in his life history.

Post-R continuing right where pre-R left off, therefore, he found himself back in the Huntzberger Publishing Group. Logan discerned some morbid design in this: that in the moment he was thinking of falling off the face of the earth, his grandfather was dying and expressly telling Mitchum to get Logan back into the fold and take on his family responsibilities. So. Logan donned his suit, did his best to chuck any remaining chips off his shoulder, and became the son and CEO that made his father proud. Now Thoreau perhaps wouldn't call running a newspaper business and practically living in airplanes and boardrooms an example of _living life deeply_, but he should give the 31 year-old a break. For someone who felt that all of life had been sucked out of him seven years ago, he was alive. Being a good son. And making tons of money.

And now he's a veritable social success, about to fulfill the genealogical hopes and genetic dreams his mother harbored. He's gone and become engaged to Louisa Monroe (and Shira's cup overfloweth). Louisa who was blonde and green-eyed and the epitome of all he had once given up and now come back to (the epitome of _not her_, as post-R conditions required).

Logan only wished her skin wasn't so pale. The palest blue-green vein that he can see snaking around Louisa's ankle bone reminded him of similar-colored paths he had once traced, like a map, on similarly translucent skin that dipped and hollowed only to his hand.

And he wished she were a little stupider. Louisa's little speeches on Impressionists and Post-Impressionists as curatorial assistant at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum smacked of a surprisingly intelligent mind, and consequently brought about the unwanted reminder of that other intelligent woman who can just as well hold her own in an art history debate. (Louisa would probably take Cezanne, while the other had always been partial to Monet. A potentially hot but bizarre rendition of Finn's women mud wrestling fantasies.) That woman could take him on easily too, not on art, but on such burning issues as whether it is right to treat one's bartender with a Judi Dench-en air of superiority (even if said bartender was a lying opportunist ass who made several unwelcome passes _at her)_. That singular conversation was among the few things that remained in pig-headed clarity from that brief snafu in Logan's life. Understandably, he wished his fiancee were a little stupider.

Thankfully, Louisa neither watched television nor drank coffee, which to him were among her more attractive qualities. Television and coffee and all that once entailed (chocolate syrup, Monty Python marathons, and making out on the sofa) being distinctly unhealthy, of course.

_Are we there yet, baby?_ Louisa's voice wafted through the cloud formations in his mind. (Yes indeed, was he there yet?) His nausea cleared, on cue, as the wheels scraped on the JFK runway and the engine roared in his head. He had touched down from a great height, relatively unscathed.

"I just love New York," Louisa sighed, gazing out at the view of the nondescript hangar over his shoulder.

"So do I," he smiled at her, kissing her hand. "Though I don't know…I'll probably miss the constant crappiness of London weather and seeing the lovely Ms. Paltrow in my elevator every morning for the last four years. If I had a few more days, she would have given in, you know. But the New Jersey skyline does bring tears to my eyes," he intoned dramatically.

"Oh, stop mocking me." Louisa swatted his arm, dabbing at her eye. She was awash in sentimentality over coming home, and excitement over coming home as fiancee to _the_ Logan Huntzberger.

Disembarking from the plane in the midst of a spirited London-versus-New-York debate ("New Yorkers are ruder, but Brits are uglier"), it unfortunately did not occur to Logan that the smashing success of his post-R life might get a tad complicated now that he had touched down in the very space and time where one Rory Gilmore continued to _be_.

Perhaps he really should have stayed in London and suffered the crappy weather.

­­---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_She would have liked to know how he felt as to a meeting. Perhaps indifferent, if indifference could exist under such circumstances. He must be either indifferent or unwilling. Had he wished ever to see her again, he need not have waited till this time; he would have done what she could not but believe that in his place she should have done long ago. ( Chapter VII)_

ii.

Squealing, there was squealing. No—he remembered his metaphor—chirping. A peal of laughter clanged in his sleep-addled brain like some torturous alarm clock that wouldn't shut off, the kind you want to shatter against the wall. _Squealing_, definitely. Logan tried stuffing a pillow in his ear, as Louisa brought her phone conversation right into the bedroom.

"No!...NO! Oh God, you must bring her to the party! Or I won't believe a word you're saying. I've got to meet her and size her up properly!" she insisted.

_Yes, let's size up the unfortunate girl around noon and leave her and I in peace for now, shall we?_ Logan scratched his bare chest with some annoyance and idly wondered which girlfriend of which friend twice removed was the subject of this early morning call. They already had the coffee with Tricia (the new girlfriend) and Jake (the ex-boyfriend from high school), and the dinner with Liz (the best friend from second grade) and Brian (the new boyfriend). He was in turns amused and terrified at her freakish ability to exponentially expand her social circle; she was an elephantine social butterfly and all of New York society was at her mercy. (Now butterfly seemed an improvement over bird, despite the unflattering modifier.)

"Oh my God, this just keeps getting better and better. A writer for _The Times!_ Why would such a respectable woman ever fall for you, David?" Louisa teased. "Does she know of your sordid past? Oh right, she's a reporter!" she laughed at her own little joke.

Logan's pillow-stuffed ear perked up. _A reporter, hmph_. _David my man, whoever you are, know that women journalists aren't all that hot, unless you go for the Christiane Amanpour type. Unless they write for Cosmo._ Logan forced open one bleary eye, and saw Louisa seated at the edge of the bed, meditatively shaking one crossed leg as she listened to further exultations at the other end of the line.

"She sounds amazing, David," Louisa said seriously. "And it's been so long after…I know, but honestly you were…okay, okay, all I'm saying is that I'm so glad you're happy. This Rory had better treat you better than Stella. God, I so hated that woman. Have you heard that she had gone and broken off with Anthony, too?"

For some surreal span of time, his breathing seemed to stop and his body jerked as one who woke up abruptly with a sensation of falling. Had he fallen back asleep? Was this another one of _those_ dreams? Did her name just come out of Louisa's chirping mouth, squeezed somewhere among those other names? Just like a dream, he watched as Louisa turned to him in slow-motion, wide-eyed and with a wide O…

She began excitedly shaking his calf under the blanket. "She knows Logan? Where? How?"

_Who? Fuck, who are you talking about?_

Louisa Monroe, in her perfect ignorance, covered the mouthpiece with her hand as she whispered loudly to her fiance, "Rory Gilmore—you know her from Yale—is the girlfriend of David, my cousin!" She giggled back into the phone. "This would make hanging out so much easier! What a lucky coincidence!"

Hang out? Lucky? (And just who the hell is David?) Stunned, his mind became slow and quite unable to process the information that Louisa was now rattling off to him. He would much prefer that she squeal. Chirp.

The facts he managed to gather were these:

1) David is Louisa's favorite cousin. ("I've told you all about him. We practically grew up as brother and sister.") Well, this was new to him.

2) David is the boyfriend of Rory Gilmore. ("She's a writer for _The Times_. You might have been reading her work, for all you know. Knowing David, I bet she's some beautiful, brainy type.") None of this was new to him.

3) The piece-de-resistance: Rory Gilmore apparently knew Logan in Yale. ("!!!")

"Now just because you were in _college_ then—and I know all about what goes on in college, especially for _your sort,_ baby—I want to assure you that I'm not at all bothered by you two having once dated or whatever eons ago. David and I think that you two knowing each other is brilliant, actually."

"What's my sort?" Logan asked quizzically, the one point he decided he could respond to.

"The sort who doesn't do relationships, sweetie," she elaborated, soothing the barb with a kiss on his forehead. She swept across the room in a flurry of silken robes and called from the bathroom doorway, "Now, she'll be coming tonight, so you two can catch up." And with that, the bathroom door mercifully shut.

Another fact:

4) He was about to see Rory again. Rory Gilmore, whom he "once dated or whatever eons ago". (_Whatever_, bless Louisa's 23 year-old vocabulary, did seem the most apt description.) And life as he knew it the past seven years just might come to an end. But not necessarily. In fact, _no_.

He turned on his stomach and buried his head in goosedown. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. But it will elude him now, of course; perhaps peace will elude him until that first meeting in seven years is gotten over with. He'd only have to steel himself for the next—he glanced at the clock on the bedside table—eight hours, as it was apparently 11 in the morning.

He once had a collection of imagined scripts and scenarios about their first meeting. What he would do, what she would say. (Perhaps she would follow him to Palo Alto. Appear in his doorstep and beg to be taken back. Right.) He was in a drunken stupor through most of the imagining and had therefore forgotten most of them, but he was sure he never imagined it to be like this. That she would be in _his_ world, the very world that she and her best-friend-of-a-mother detested. And not remotely, by simple virtue of being a Gilmore. But rather, ensconced in his very innermost circle, _sharing a bed with a_ _Monroe_, for Christ's sake. As he is, himself.

What a fucking cosmic joke it all was.

He pressed his head back against the pillow and plowed his hair with his fingers. Staring at the ceiling, he began to laugh, in low spurts, at the meanness and twistedness of fate. Louisa, hearing him through the shower spray, thought his reaction an appropriate, albeit delayed, expression of pleasure at the serendipity of things.

_He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal; but, except from some natural sensation of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. Her power with him was gone forever. ( Chapter VII)_

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

**A/N:** You know that my stories tend to have some "theme" or anchor (mayflies; hearts; avocadoes, etc), and now I've chosen the peerless Persuasion of Jane Austen. You need not have read the novel to read this (but if this fic would make you read Austen, oh joy). My apologies to certified Janeites out there; I do not mean to butcher Ms Austen's work if it seems that I am. I only draw from her work some general themes, storylines, and characters.

This chapter has been difficult to write. I don't think I've ever written Logan as not loving, or believing he doesn't love, Rory. (And even now that I've written and posted it, of course I cannot believe it!) Thank you as always for reading and giving such generous reviews.


	4. Chapter 4

…_while a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over._

"_It is over! It is over!" she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over!" ( Chapter VII)_

Rory had occupied herself at work most admirably the entire afternoon, saving herself from _agonizing_, as her mother had accused, over the inevitable meeting that evening. She had resigned herself to the _Inevitable_. Until a week ago, such a meeting was not inevitable; it was not even probable. She knew he had been 3,470 miles away, and had been so for the stretch of roughly 1,460 days (out of the 2,555), and with 6 billion breathing bodies between he and she on the planet, she had come to seriously doubt whether they would actually

She tore at the frayed cuticle on her big toe quite savagely, effectively halting her familiar lapse to numerical, agonizing idiocy. The pain brought tears to her eyes, and it sharpened her focus back to the task at hand. She must concentrate on perfecting her pedicure; let it not be said that Rory Gilmore walked into the lion's den with jagged toenails and ragged cuticles. No, she would meet this Louisa Monroe in a blaze of crimson-toed glory.

As she carefully stroked on the paint with its tiny brush, chin resting on her freshly shaved knee, she was momentarily soothed by a sense of oneness with countless members of her sex who must have likewise undergone the exquisite torments of preparing to meet an ex-boyfriend. Not just an ex-boyfriend, in fact, but the very one. She was old enough to speak the truth to herself—Logan Huntzberger had been _the_ One. Seven years ago, true, but in her mind the (definite) article 'the' had yet to be replaced by the (indefinite) 'a'; the capitalized 'O' had yet to be replaced by its lowercase.

The one he may have been, but surely there were hundreds, thousands of women like her who had survived the inevitable or improbable encounter with the ex? Thousands of women like her who had scrutinized and criticized themselves in every dress they owned (forming an impressive mountain of clothing on their beds); thousands of women who had felt queasy enough not to eat anything the entire day (thankfully shrinking bloat or poundage that hounded them over the years). Thousands of women like her who stared at themselves in the mirror, finally satisfied that the ex (the One) would fall to his knees and weep with regret at their crimson-toed feet upon laying eyes on their perfection. The scenario is really quite commonplace, so she tried to convince herself, standing in her kitchen and munching on a fistful of Loops while waiting for David.

Such an occasion, such preparation, would have warranted the sympathetic gaggle of girlfriends, the voice of Lorelai on speaker phone instructing her on what color of lipstick to apply for the kill. But Rory preferred to do it alone, sans Lorelai, Lane, or Julia and Hannah who would have gamely hurled invectives at Louisa's effervescent bubbles until they burst (all part of the preparatory ritual, of course). She'd rather be alone. Because when she stared at herself in the mirror, she caught the hint of regret in her own eyes—doubtful that she'd see it in his—a matched set with the dead weight of dread in her stomach. At least the thin gold straps of her heels matched her earrings, likewise.

No, it was not a simple matter of meeting an ex, as if it were some banal high school reunion. She was steeling herself for the encounter she had been conjuring in her sleep more nights than not. Ever since he walked away.

How could he fall at her feet, moreover, when the Monroes—his and hers—would be standing alongside their imagined tête-à-tête?

There are not thousands, but perhaps just a few women, in a situation like hers.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"She has an Art History degree from Cambridge, and she's been working as an assistant curator in the Fitzwilliam Museum this last year."

_Effervescent is to bubbly is to airhead. Not. Will she be denied any gleeful satisfaction from this? _She hoped for hair on Louisa Monroe's upper lip, and said, "Oh, wow. Sounds like she can give Kate Middleton a run for the Mrs. HRH crown. There's some serious competition for Prince William's heart right there."

David gave Rory a queer look as he killed the engine, and began to laugh, belatedly. "Well, actually…"

Rory's eyes widened. _Seriously? Prince William?_ _While my claim to fame is square dancing with Barack Obama in Iowa, and shaking hands with Christiane Amanpour in my pajamas._ She looked down and checked her toes as David locked the car and walked to her side.

"She watched him playing polo and had dinner a couple of times with some common friends is all. Louisa's like that. She could charm the socks off of anyone, even the Queen." He looked down at Rory, who had been pensive throughout the drive. "Even you, Rory. I think you'll like her," he smiled, hopeful.

Rory gave David a wan smile. "No worries. I'm so charm-able. Tell me she's had drinks with Bono, too, and she's as good as my long-lost sister." David was so earnest, so eager for her to like and be liked by his family. It made her uncomfortable. She was not in the running for any crown.

"Charm-able, huh. So the months I spent in pursuit of you must indicate that something's really terrible about my personality. I know I keep up my oral hygiene."

"Well you're no Bono, but you will do," Rory reassured, squeezing his arm distractedly. They were walking up the long driveway to the front door, which was open and spewing light and chatter and music. So inviting. Meanwhile, her legs felt heavy. Such a long driveway.

"Now I feel like that talking pig. 'That'll do, pi—' Man, this place is huge," David interrupted himself as he took in the Huntzberger mansion up close. Rory raised an eyebrow in the dark. They were just as moneyed, but she'll grant that the Monroes were slightly less ostentatious in their stylish 700 sq. meter digs scattered along the Upper East Side.

"I hope their plumbing is good. Any pooling would take months to discover and drain." An old comment coming up unbidden, resurfacing from the last time she walked up that driveway. The memory only helped to increase the chill in her gut under her burgundy wool coat.

They entered the foyer. As the warmth and crush of fragrant people pressed in on Rory, she ironically, thankfully, felt the numbness in her legs and insides gradually liquefy. The tinkling of wine glasses, of ambient piano keys, doused the flitting images in her head of ice blue dresses, a faceless Fallon girl, a long-ago dinner gone awry. Surely she had gained in wisdom and fortitude in the ten years since? _Well, let's get this over and done with then_, she thought to herself with growing calm, shrugging her coat gracefully into David's hands.

She meandered alone and around the marble pillars as David deposited their coats. She stopped in front of Diego Velazquez's _Infanta something-or-other_, vaguely comforted by the familiarity of the painting, the inconspicuousness of her presence. Ten minutes in and no one had yet accosted her for being where she wasn't supposed to be. A good omen. As was the beatific face of the girl child in the painting. _You've done nothing wrong, Rory._

"Is that a Velazquez?" David reappeared by her side, sliding his arm around her waist. "Come on, let's go find Louisa and her Logan."

_Yes, let's. Finally. Across the country, the Atlantic, and back, it is time for me to find Logan._

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rory was not as inconspicuous as she thought.

It began with a prickling at the nape of his neck, which spread down his arm to a restless shaking of the hand that held his drink. He swirled, and the liquid sloshed a bit down the sides of the glass. Louisa was gaily regaling the Furstenbergs with the details of her crystal-studded wedding dress (how heavy is that? he wondered), and Logan felt justified in excusing himself.

"Sometimes I do wish I were the groom. Just a tux with a neat little bowtie and _voila!_" Louisa rued, laughing.

"And have you wither from the lack of attention? I wouldn't allow that," Logan replied seriously. "Excuse me," he nodded to their company, and turned swiftly on his heel.

The air had shifted in the house, as if disturbed by the colliding molecules of a new presence. He needed to move. He wasn't sure where he was going, smiling and shaking hands with his guests as he went along. (Louisa's and his parents' guests, rather. He really wouldn't know the -bergs and -bergers from Adam and Eve.) Until he found himself striding up the winding staircase that receded against the wall, two steps at a time, the stairs leading up to a circumferential balcony that overlooked the living room. It was nearly a 30-foot distance to the floor below. As he rested his elbows a moment on the balustrade, his eyes zoomed onto a still figure, a point of focus in a restless room seething with the movement of bobbing heads.

He knew it was her.

Her hair was shorter than he had ever seen or remembered it; the ends curved slightly inward to touch her chin. It exposed her neck. And from his view from above, it was all he could see. Her neck made longer by its not being hidden under the heaviness of her hair; made longer by the unbroken view of her sloping upper back. And so white was her neck and back against the deep dip and blue of her dress. His empty hand twitched reflexively, and he allowed it to curve around his glass. Her toes, he also saw, were red.

Logan ran his fingers under his collar. He felt hot and tight, strung-out from his run up the long stairs (or so he reasoned). He neither blinked nor flinched from his perusal of her, unconsciously willing her not to turn around. He might need a moment, another drink to brace himself for the blue of her eyes—the real blue, not the washed-out version in his memory. She did not turn around. Rather, her face turned abruptly to the side (the sudden shift from stillness surprising him) to look at a man who had sidled up to her. The man wound his arm around her waist, his sleeve touching her bare pale back. He pointed to the Velazquez, and she might well be telling him its title and the year it was painted. Not that the man—David, he supposed—would be particularly interested in the triviality, but it would certainly serve to magnify her quirky charm. Logan's hand prickled again, drops of his drink falling on the balustrade. Swiping them with his sleeve, he suddenly recalled his 7 year-old self squeezing and swinging between these banisters after a solitary viewing of _Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade_. He had very nearly fallen. He stepped back now from the edge.

It gave him an unfair upper hand, being able to watch Rory like this before they actually met again. To saturate himself in her white neck and red toes as if to inure himself. There again, his sleeve touching her skin. Desensitization. He wouldn't be caught off guard. Not by the sight of a man standing next to her. Nor would he fall into the depth of her blue eyes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It all happened very suddenly. Suddenly David raised his hand in a violent wave; suddenly there was a shout of "Louie!" and a squeal (a chirp?) of "Davey! Oh my God!". A flash of something white and shiny (and bubbly); a jostling of bodies next to her as the cousins-cum-brother-and-sister hugged each other. Rory stepped clear and couldn't help smiling at their exuberance. _Davey?_ Her glance slid sideward—she caught her breath as she caught sight of a blonde man standing in the periphery—her glance slid downward and she stared at the tip of his shoe. _Now, Rory. Now. Just look at him for God's sake, woman. Remember the crimson toenails! _But he stepped a fraction away from her peripheral view. They formed a funny little semi-circle, a dance of shifting eyes and stances as they looked intently on the happy twosome between them. Their eyes glanced over each other, seeing but not seeing; she saw his hair ever slightly askew over his ears, he noticed hers sideswept to cover the corner of her left eye. Then the couples rearranged themselves properly, Rory looking at Louisa for the first time, the newness of the person a convenient reason for ignoring the man opposite her.

"Louisa, this is Rory Gilmore. Rory, my cousin."

_Must alert the anti-Barbie movement_, was Rory's initial thought. A woman _can_ apparently have a pair of C-cups, a wasp of a waist, and almost mannish hips without keeling over from imbalance, despite the rules of symmetry governing normal human physiology. (Then again, is it the product of normal human physiology, or supernormal medical technology? she wondered.)

"Hi!" Rory stretched her smile a little wider, to atone for the ungenerous thought. "It's good to meet you. I've heard so much about you." _More famous, clever first words from Rory Gilmore._ As her hand was clasped by Louisa, whose smile was wider than hers, (did she ever see such white teeth?) she felt herself being pulled unwillingly forward as Louisa raised her cheek. Rory stumbled awkwardly against the cool face. And as she did, she felt a rush of panic, a contraction in her chest. _Would she and Logan have to kiss each other's cheeks, too?_

"Me too! I'm so happy you could make it—" she was still holding Rory's hands—"David was telling me about some awful deadline or other that you were scrambling to meet. So am I to read an article with your byline over breakfast? Please let it not be another depressing treatise about melting ice caps!"

"Actually, Rory is assistant news editor in the dot com version of _The Times._ You'd only read her now and then—once or twice a week?—in the Education and Metro sections. Which is really unfortunate because she's a brilliant writer. She last wrote about the history curriculum in the top public schools in the country, isn't that right, Ror?" David squeezed her shoulder in obvious, embarassment-inducing pride. "What the textbooks are teaching about Iraq and all that."

"That sounds wonderful and intimidating and highbrow. I myself can't write or read anything of consequence in the real world. I confess my favorite section is in the Arts—I know, ho-hum—and the crossword puzzles. But now I've done it—I've just admitted to subscribing to Logan's competition! Tell me you still love me," Louisa turned quickly to Logan, then to Rory and back. "Oh how stupid of me to forget—but you and Rory don't need much of an introduction right?"

"Well I also review books, and movies," Rory added belatedly. "Have you guys watched Joe Wright's _Jane Eyre?_" She would have been perfectly happy to fade into the marble, but she felt she must assert herself against David's litany of knowledge of her and the impending introduction.

"Books, movies, and Bronte, I should have known," Logan finally spoke, his voice a bit rusty. "How've you been?" he casually asked, extending his hand.

Rory took it, shook it, dropped it. Thinking back to that moment, Rory felt that their handshake was the nth in a series of handshakes. (It probably was; for sure he had shaken countless hands that night.) Fingers slightly limp, loose, and dry, and that infinitesimal effort at a squeeze. They looked straight into each other's eyes, and neither the blue nor the brown flinched. Her eyes stung from the effort.

"I'm good. You? How are you, Logan?"

The roll of his name off her tongue was unexpected. It jarred him, how it sounded so familiar. "Fine," he clipped.

And so there it was. The worst was over. The momentous meeting after seven years, between a couple once in _true love_, reduced to the mechanical and meaningless social niceties of strangers. (In fact, Rory has this very exchange with her Starbucks barista every morning.)

"Hell—you're not just _fine_, man, you're marrying Louisa!" David had exclaimed, clapping Logan's shoulder. "I'm David, by the way," he added, grasping Logan's hand.

"Oh right, congratulations to both of you!" Rory added with as much chime as she can muster.

"David, good to meet you!" Logan said, pumping David's hand. "And here I thought Louisa being an only child meant I'd have to suffer without the time-honored tradition of—"

"A bachelor party? Davey, you wouldn't!" Louisa pouted. "Logan and I had planned our calendar for the next four weeks until the…" She rolled her eyes at Rory to convey the extent of her dismay and disgust.

_Four weeks._

"Well if not Davey, then I would have ably filled in the gap, sweetheart." A tall, dark-haired lanky man swooped in on their crowd to kiss Louisa's hand. "I'm Finn, by the way, Logan's stepbrother? I'm sure you can see the resemblance. Same thick, oozy charm, same rakish hair. I'm sure I can squeeze in a tawdry striptease for Logan in between tea and scones with the wedding planner next Thursday."

"I've seen you in a striptease at least a dozen times, Finn," Logan replied drily. "Surely I deserve something more special this time around? And I've introduced you to Louisa _thrice_ this evening—Louisa, don't take offense, ethanol had irreparably damaged Finn's brain cells." Then he catches Rory's eye, and remembers with discomfort that Finn and Rory had coincided in his life for a time. He cleared his throat and gestures vaguely, "Uh…Finn you remember Ro—"

But Finn was already examing Rory from head to toe, to David's chagrin. "I don't believe _we've_ met tonight, love. I would have remembered you for sure…"

"My _girlfriend_, Rory Gilmore," David willingly supplied.

"Ror—" Finn did a slight double-take, a small guffaw escaping from his throat as he looked from Rory to Logan. "Forgive me, love, I'm afraid my college years are all a blur, including, unfortunately, probably the best sexual encounters of my life. But of course, Rory Gilmore. Our intrepid _Ace_ reporter." He couldn't resist.

_Fucking bastard_, Logan thought. _Oh shit!_, on Rory's part.

"Um, we're not talking about Tila Nguyen jumping out of a five-tier confection, Lou," Logan intercepted, as Louisa's pout deepened at Finn's antics. "It will be an entirely respectable…er…gentleman's evening, with your cousin at the helm." With that, Finn proceeded to euphemistically discuss the cigars that such an evening warranted.

All in all, barring Finn's near faux pas, it was an innocuous enough reunion in Rory's assessment. Civil, consoling even, as the banter among the men overtook her needless anxiety. David and Logan were fast friends, and she felt no antagonism towards Louisa (despite the C-cups and absence of facial hair). But as she stood in linked arms with Louisa, looking quietly at David and Logan, her serenity dissolved as she realized in a sudden flash of clarity how their inopportune foursome came to be.

Logan and David, both blonde and brown-eyed, seemed nearly, freakishly, like blood brothers. Same bright smile, Ivy League schooled, the former only being a tad smarter, more charming, wittier, more accomplished (as brothers usually go). Whereas with her dark hair and blue eyes, and the other's green-eyed paleness; with the evident differences in their interests and temperament, she and Louisa cannot be any more unalike.

She knew then that in the last seven years, she had been searching for one like Logan. And had not been successful. She had wanted _a_ Logan. No, she revised, removing the indefinite article. She wanted Logan.

While Logan had chosen to end up with someone decidedly unlike her. She likewise understood what that meant.

She felt her face flush at the revelation. Was this apparent only to her? Or did he see it, too? She needed to be somewhere far, far away. Because she was about to cry. She gently extricated herself from Louisa, nodded to David, and said quietly, "Excuse me. I just need to go to the ladies' room."

"Are you okay, Ror? You look all hot and red," David murmured with some concern, catching her arm.

Logan, looking at her longer than he wanted, thought she looked startled, in contrast to the last five minutes when she had been all placid and composed. Her too bright eyes pierced him even as she stared far across the room. Was it Finn's fucking insensitive reference to 'Ace'?

"No, I'm fine. Just need to…go. Please, excuse me a moment."

She turned to go, as Louisa called, "Oh wait, let me show you where."

And unthinking, she turned back to say, "I know," leaving Louisa to wonder a moment whether and in what circumstances Rory had been inside the Huntzberger mansion before.

Of course Rory knew where the ladies' room is. She knew the lay of the land; the landscape of her heart and his. The hopelessness of it all. The worst is over. Or perhaps—with her new understanding, with the fresh memory to draw on of him squeezing her fingers lightly—it has just begun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and tried to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals—all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life. _

_Alas! With all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing. ( Chapter VII)_

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

**A/N:** And the party (oh, agony!) is not over. Just couldn't cram everything into one chapter (this is something I need to absorb and mull over, as perhaps you do, too). Happy holidays everyone, and thanks for the generous reviews, as always.


	5. Chapter 5

"_Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne…Henrietta asked him what he thought of you…and he said, 'You were so altered he should not have known you again.'"_

"_Altered beyond his knowledge!" Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so; and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse…She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth._

_So altered that he should not have known her again! __These were words which could not but dwell with her. Yet she soon began to rejoice that she had heard them. They were of sobering tendency; they allayed agitation; they composed, and consequently must make her happier._

"That was uncalled for," Logan muttered, shutting the door behind him.

"Sorry about that," Finn replied, knowing instantly what he was referring to. They retreated to the library, seeking a brief respite before rejoining the stiff and proper gaiety of Logan's engagement party. All the two men had to do was exchange a look above Louisa's head, and they went off in silent conspiracy. It was a signal that decades of forming parties-within-parties had perfected.

Logan walked aimlessly about for a minute, before dropping onto the brown leather sofa. Seated at the very edge, his body was crouched and tense, ready to spring. Finn unfolded his long frame in the space beside him and propped his feet on the coffee table. He lit a cigarette and leaned back to consider the smoke spiraling upwards in white haze.

"The situation is so fucking bizzaro, my friend, that my brain was slower than usual on the uptake. In fact, this is like some version of my worst nightmare. The love of my life—my sparkling redhead nymphomaniac of a bride-to-be currently known as Tatiana—inadvertently meets the harem of my youth." He closed his eyes a moment, then shuddered in horror.

"Nympho. Harem?" Logan shook his head as he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Nightmare or fantasy, Finn?"

"Well it actually depends on the ending. Either they all figure out I'm the biggest ass from Down Under, or they all go _down_ on …"

"Right, I get the…uh, picture," Logan said, chuckling low. "Thanks for the visual man, that _is_ a fucking nightmare."

Silence ensued, granting the men a moment to digest the meeting that transpired 10 minutes ago. The light repartee between fiancée and ex-girlfriend, fiancé and the now-boyfriend belied the strange and fragile air that at least one of them—Rory—seemed unable to withstand for long.

"So. Rory Gilmore," Finn finally said. "Nightmare or fantasy, Logan?"

Logan looked into his glass as if to think about it, swirling the question in his drink. As if composing an answer to Finn, in the confidence of college buddies. _Rory. Here. Nightmare or fantasy? _But no, he wasn't going to think about it. He didn't want to think about it. And he sure as hell wanted to slug Finn's ass for making him think about it.

"Just shut up, mate," Logan quietly replied, standing up and walking away.

Finn, knowing Logan, understood. He didn't press the matter. He whistled under his breath, and thanked his female God that his fantasies—or nightmares—remained in his dreams, unsullied by the stickiness of real life.

Logan added, "And no more of that…_Ace_ shit from you." The word felt thick on his tongue. It could have been a Russian or German monosyllable.

"Oh ho, sorry for my abuse of the sacred word." Finn raised his arm in mock apology as Logan shot him a dangerous look. "Ah, if only Colin were here, then my schadenfreude would be complete. Such joy we would have in our miserable uneventful lives getting drunk over this latest conundrum of yours."

"Of course. I don't expect anything less from my friends. Your loyalty gives me the warm and fuzzies."

"The loves and travails of Logan Huntzberger is way more interesting than a weekend at the Grenadines with that simpering, insipid girlfriend of his."

"Whom you once dated."

"And who dumped me. Like I said, insipid."

"You two should stop swapping girlfriends and engaging in these incestuous relationships. It was pathetic enough in college; it's painful now at your age." He was happy to shift to the subject of Finn and Colin's perversions.

"Did you say _incestuou_s?" Finn sputtered, flicking his cigarette carelessly. "Hey, I'm not the one who's hooking up with my _cousin-in-law_, practically. Then again," he said with a heavy sigh, "you were always the pioneer, mate. Do share with us how the menage-a-trois—oh, make that a menage-a-quatre, we wouldn't want to exclude poor Davey—turns out."

"I have yet to be anyone's in-anything. And save the menage for your fantasy." Logan was getting sorely irritated. "And will you stop that?" he added sharply, venting unknown feelings. "There's ash all over the rug." He couldn't care less about the rug. "Hell, this room stinks." He left his drink on a shelf—barely touched, really—and strode behind his father's desk to the French windows, slightly ajar.

Finn ignored him, clearly enjoying himself. "Besides, Colin would have recognized her instantly. I envy that bastard's self-protective mechanism that keeps angry ex-lovers at bay."

The early winter air seeping from the open panes cooled Logan's parched eyes. He breathed a bit easier. He leaned his forearm against the glass, peering out to the night.

"I don't blame you for not recognizing her," he said mostly to himself. "She's changed so much I wouldn't have recognized her myself."

She had been the wide-eyed, somewhat naïve college girl whose eyes lit up in thrill at the prospect of a two-hour philosophy seminar, a meeting with Seymour Hersh. So earnest as to sniff the pages of forgotten books in the library; so endearingly indignant when he riled her with his stupid arguments. There was something fresh and untainted about her. He remembered now how a flush radiated up from her chest to her cheeks as he sucked on her—well, fuck _that_, he interrupted himself. Her hair. It had been so long, it spread out over her shoulders and his. It spilled out of his grasp and drifted in the air, when she last spoke to him on the Yale lawn that May.

Now her hair was short. Darker. Exposing herself and her eyes and her skin, entangling nothing and no one. Her stance seemed straighter (how larger-than-life she seemed to grow beside Louisa), and how artlessly sophisticated and confidently poised her shoulders seemed. She's changed. He thought her more beautiful.

His rumination of her shoulders seemed to summon her very reflection on the window glass. She was looking at him with sad eyes, points of light floating in the dark. He looked back, for a few seconds allowing the restraint of the last seven years to fall away from his face.

_Why, Rory?_

And then—so sudden, like a slap on his dreaming face—the image moved, _walked_ backward, before turning away from him.

She was out there. His forgotten fantasy. The nightmare that had broken him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rory was freezing. But it was good; the sharp prickling of her ears and fingers distracted her from other pains. She was starting to feel the onset of a massive headache. That was good. She had leaned back against the wall outside the library in an attempt to shield at least her bare back from the air. But the wall of course was stone cold. The cold air, cold ears, cold back, cold stone brought her scattered emotions to heel. And it was good.

Her tears, though, were hot. It thawed little trails on her face from eyes to chin. But that was okay. It is, after all, the last time. She had already promised herself that this is the last time she would cry over Logan.

She had never before made such a promise, and allowed herself a Gilmore wallow over some memory every now and then. (Most recently, over the sight of an open black umbrella, of all things, while walking along 5th.) Thinking of him was harmless, she had reasoned, and crying about him inconsequential, because in the course of seven years he had dissipated into something intangible in her world. Like crying over a beloved character, or the nth reading of a poignant line in a favorite novel. Logan had become fiction, a ghost, as it were. It didn't hurt anyone.

But tonight he was real. She had seen him, and he had touched her. And he loved and belonged to someone else. To shed tears over him would now seem pitiful, pointless, stupid. There is pain involved, the kind that was now being effectively overwhelmed by the cold. How fitting, albeit inconvenient, that this last cry should happen at his engagement party.

She had retreated not to the bathroom but to the library, where her subconscious always led her whenever she needed an escape. But not two minutes into her foray among the shelves, she heard the sounds of approaching persons, so she stepped out to the cold veranda. Which was even better. Where else to contemplate the inexplicable loss of a love than in winter chill? How inexplicable it was. She had loved him—and he loved her! He made her so happy. She felt so cherished in his arms, so desirable yet so safe. How can she forget these elemental truths? But then he walked away—literally—not as a person drifting away over the course of an unraveling relationship. No. They were together one moment, contemplating some future together. And in the next moment, he walked away. Leaving her alone in her black cap and gown, and then for months, years. Alone still. How inexplicable it was…

Her last wallow was being disturbed. Someone was shouting in the library. A man's voice_—"Will you stop that?"_ Something about ruining the rug. Rory stood very still, as a shadow stepped into the light at her feet. Someone had come to the window beside her cold stone wall.

"_I don't blame you for not recognizing her. She's changed so much I wouldn't have recognized her myself."_

Logan, his distinctive voice muffled through the glass. _She's changed so much I wouldn't have recognized her…_ it echoed and bounced off the stones embedded on the ground. And even in temperatures in the 40-degrees, Rory felt the heat rise in her throat.

Now Rory is far from being vain about her looks. She was indifferent to it for the most part, though there were times she wished her forehead weren't so wide, or her calves weren't so shapeless. But won't any woman's sensitivities be pricked by such an account from a former lover of how they had become unappealing over the years? For in the shambles of her heart, that is how Rory took it: she had so changed in the last seven years, and no longer suited her ex-boyfriend's taste. Perhaps it was the tiny vestiges of crow's feet that now appeared when her eyes smiled. Or that her once glorious crown of hair came down to just her chin. Or that Louisa was, well, perfect.

She looked down at her crimson toes, so painstakingly pedicured, and stifled a scornful laugh. The sentence overheard was a timely gift, a reality check. _Now I must hie my fugly 29-year-old self out of here._ First, she wondered how far a walk it is to Stars Hollow. Then she wondered when the best time would be to break up with David. Last, she thought about moving to Africa.

Mulling over these questions, she turned around, but stopped short at the sight of Logan's face peering out of the window. He was looking at her, but unseeing, his eyes conveying an inscrutable sadness that she had never seen or expected to see. A wave of emotion washed over her, so warm it seemed to melt her frozen bones. Rory allowed herself a last look.

_Oh, Logan. I've missed you._

Then Rory began to walk away.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What had possessed him to go after her? Had he known what it would unleash, he might have restrained himself.

"Rory." He coughed, stopping a few paces outside the open doorway of the library leading to the veranda. The cold air slapped him hard on his face. He can only imagine what it felt like against Rory's bare back… Logan stuffed his hands in his pockets.

_Shit_, she thought, swiping quickly at her eyes. Rory had reached the balustrade at the edge of the covered veranda and had nowhere further to go. She turned to face Logan, her hands holding on to the railing behind her. Lest she fall. Standing that way with her chin slightly raised and elbows sticking out like wings, Logan thought she looked braced for flight. Or fight? Her nose was red.

"You okay?" he first thought to say.

"Okay enough. Thanks. Just needed…air," she said haltingly, gesturing to the foliage behind her. "Must have inhaled a little too much Chanel no. 5 in there."

"Right. You hate these kinds of parties."

This knowledge of her, so plainly stated, neutralized the air between them and chipped away at the awkwardness of their reunion. It was not entirely a good thing, though, for Rory bristled at his cocksureness, especially after his having just referred to her as _unrecognizable_.

"Oh, do I?" she challenged archly.

"Enough to prefer losing a limb from hypothermia, apparently, yes. You hate all this." He jerked a hand out of his pocket and flipped it over his tux. "Bet you were thinking you could camp out with Dostoevsky until the worst of the Chanel blew over. Sneak in a cup of coffee."

"Well, I don't know, I _have_ changed so much…" She crossed her winged arms over her chest in the classic defensive posture.

"Have you?" Logan stifled an amused laugh, and ended up with a half smile (unknowingly infuriating Rory further). So she overheard him. And it's made her upset. It goaded him all the more.

"Perhaps you have," he agreed. "Wouldn't have figured David as your type at all. Too…blonde. And what with his kind liable to constrict the _wide open future_ of women with big dreams and all. Unless…well unless your dreams have changed too, of course. I know you serve a mean salmon puff."

He couldn't help himself, the words rising sparklingly clear, nearly verbatim, from the trove of resentment he had buried at the grounds of Yosemite. He couldn't help himself; in his mind, there flashed his sleeve against her bare back. _My girlfriend, Rory Gilmore,_ said possessively to Finn and the rest of their party. Said _to him_. Someone ought to be punished.

And Rory's heart grew cold. Colder than what another hour out in the garden would have achieved. How dare he bring that up now, just like that, without any reverence to her precious wallow. How dare he!

"And you _haven't_ changed, apparently," she retorted, watching how a slight breeze had ruffled his hair. "Louisa suits you perfectly. The kind who worships you like a deity and liable to put up with your arrogant, rude, unspeakable, unbelievable, infuriating…uh," she sputtered, "…hair!"

"My _hair_ is infuriating? Why, thank you. You've gone soft with your creative barbs, Gilmore. Another change, I suppose? Methinks you've lacked practice. Or a deserving target."

The evening had taken on a surreal turn for Rory. What was going on? Were they arguing? Yet she wanted to kiss the smirk of his face, her eyes tearing anew in frustration.

"Just leave me, Logan. This is weird and pointless." Rory turned stiffly away from him so as to properly resume her thoughts of him.

"You'd better come inside. A frozen corpse outside the library during an evening of cocktails smacks too much of Agatha Christie. A bad omen for an engagement."

"Of course, I wouldn't ruin this happy occasion for the world." She half-turned to face him again, her body twisting to reveal her shoulder blade. "You happy, Logan?" she murmured, hating herself for asking.

He thought the curve of her shoulder blade would fit in the cup of his palm. This stirred a greater emotion in him than her question. "It's so cold," he said, shoving his hands in his pockets again.

She was thankful he neglected to answer. "Hey," she said softly. "I'm sorry for what I said. She seems lovely, inside and out." A truce. She offered a tentative smile. _Let's start again, please._ "And you go on ahead. I was really about to go to the bathroom anyway."

"I'm sorry for what I said," he replied in turn, referring not to David or the subject of her wide open future, but rather to the more neutral matter of what she had overheard him say in the library. "You're beautiful, is what that meant."

She was surprised enough to be rendered speechless. And the air between them stretched thinner, drawing them closer.

"Should I take that as a compliment?" she asked lightly. "Now my 22 year-old self feels a bit hurt."

He shook his head and smiled at his feet, looking as embarrassed as a boy but not quite pulling it off. "I'm sorry, was _that_ rude?"

"Oh no, that was perfectly polite." Rory said politely. "Thank you. You look very well, too."

He cleared his throat and moved a few steps closer to her. "So here. At least take my jacket." He started to shrug it off.

Rory felt a wave of panic, not unlike her earlier fear of might having to kiss his cheek. To wear his clothing, be encased in his warmth, would be worse. "What? No—listen, I'll—" she moved quickly past him, intending to walk right back into the house.

His fingers—the very tips, perhaps just the microscopic hair at the tips of his fingers—grazed against her back. But the hollow of her spine might have been as indelible as a fingerprint for the effect it caused. He wanted to spread his hand against her. Bury his fingers into her. They wrenched themselves further apart.

"Why are you being so bossy?"

"Why are you being so stubborn?"

Rory marched into the library, Logan at her heels, both desperately needing to be away from each other.

"Wait, Rory—before you go—" Logan began, as she reached the door.

"What?"

"Tell me. What's your story?" he asked, perching at the arm of the sofa.

"My…story? What do you mean?" She was confused, tired of playing mind games and heart games. And the cold had made her need for the bathroom legitimate.

"What did you tell David about…this," he said vaguely.

Rory looked blankly at him. God, did she have to be so dense?, he pleaded. Did she want him to spell it out?

"About us, Rory."

_Us._ Pronoun, first person plural. Bringing to their minds unwillingly the matter of there once having been an _us_, which had inexplicably become no longer. It was a difficult word to say, but the fact of its demise fortified Logan. It allowed him to withstand her presence a few minutes longer.

"We do need to be consistent, don't you think?" he continued. "I wouldn't want to make this situation more sensitive than it is. It would give our Finn too much reason for joy, you know."

"Oh, right, right." Rory crossed her forearms around her abdomen, rubbing as if to thaw. "I, um, I said we knew each other in Yale…"

"Right."

"…And that we had, uh, gone out for a while…"

"A while? What do you mean?" he pressed.

Rory shrugged her shoulders helplessly. "I don't know. Does it matter?"

_Does it matter?_

"I don't know about you, but 'a while' seems pretty vague. I was hoping a journalist can be more precise with her vocabulary."

"I don't remember what exactly I said," she retorted, surly over his arrogance. "But if its any help in satisfying your need for clarity, from the little I told him I believe he thinks we dated, hung out, whatever it was college kids did in our day. Your reputation precedes you, Huntzberger. That I was merely one among the many was pretty easy for him to swallow. I'm sure Louisa thinks so, too. But no worries, the wedding hasn't been called off despite the infamy."

Logan looked at her hard, unwaveringly, until Rory had to look away. Almost in shame. What a barefaced lie it was, they both knew. She wasn't one among many.

"Anything else?" he asked tersely.

"No…nothing else."

"Nothing. Right." Logan stood up, and felt something akin to pain in his chest. The piercing sensation had become so alien, it made him want to fold it up, nurse it, study it. In that brief moment that he recognized it, Rory saw it in his eyes.

"Logan, please—please don't think that I didn't tell David because I—" She searched for the right words. _Us was so precious to me, don't you see? How can I tell him about it, knowing he would tell your fiancée, of all people?_ "I just didn't want things to be awkward. I thought it might actually be, I don't know, common knowledge in your circle, and that I didn't have to say—"

"Common knowledge?" he shot back, in sudden frustration that it scared Rory. "No one in _my circle,_ as you call it, would celebrate the fact that I proposed marriage in public, got rejected, left the state, nearly killed myself. My mother, especially, took care of that. It's amazing really, how everyone, including you, has conveniently glossed over the whole embarrassing affair. The disgrace of Logan Huntzberger, that never was." He paced in front of her, riled up.

To be fair, he himself had brushed it off, that episodic snafu in his life. But unreasonably, he wanted to hear Rory say what happened, what really happened: _Logan wanted to marry me, but I said no._ But even she was in on the lie, the cover up. Was it not real to her? What was real? The dull ache in his chest was real.

Fuck this, he thought. He didn't want this, whatever was happening to him. So embroiled was he in keeping surfacing emotions and memories at bay that he missed the extreme pallor of Rory's face, stiff, shocked, frozen. _Nearly killed himself?_ Logan, almost, absolutely, gone. She felt faint, and had to sit on the couch.

Watching her, Logan felt some remorse for his outburst. He sat next to her, and after some moments, said with finality, "It's okay to say what you did, Rory. You're right, it was nothing. I'm the same me as ever, and you're the same you as ever, and neither of us had changed. Easier that way. That is what Louisa and David and the rest of them believe."

Except, of course, for them. For there was an _us_, once. That was real. And in that moment, both remembered. Logan's hand was lying face up on his leg, next to her own closed fist. She had had the deepest urge to hold his hand again, in a better way than their tepid first handshake, and she would no longer fight it. She carefully laid her palm on his.

"Logan, I'm sor—"

The library doors burst open, and Finn descended on them with an extra loud voice, "Oh, here they are! Found them!"

Rory and Logan abruptly stood up, as Louisa and David entered behind Finn.

"Silly goose, this Rory, I had forgotten how oddly enamored with libraries she was in Yale." Finn twirled Rory in his arms, effectively bringing some flush back to her cheeks, and widening her distance from Logan. "Have you found your Austen yet, love?"

"Austen!" David exclaimed, annoyed and cutting in on Finn's flamboyant familiarity with Rory. "You have all of Austen, Ror. I was looking everywhere for you."

Rory, helpless, was crushed against David's side. She hoped Finn would stop provoking him, as he tended to react with greater ardor than usual.

"First editions, David," Logan clarified. He put his arm around Louisa's shoulders, kissing her hair. Meanwhile, the weight of Rory's hand remained in his palm, preserved in his pocket.

"Well now it's time to dance. I'm sure that's more fun than first editions, Rory?" Louisa said, dragging Logan out of the library as strains of _Moon River_ wafted into the room. "Oh, I love this song!" she added.

Rory would have come up with a stirring argument in favor of first editions, but was too weakened by the cold, by Logan. And now, by _Moon River_. They had danced to it, at her grandparents' vow renewal. A first edition of sorts, that was.

_Was this unbearable night never going to end? _

But then—after her hot tears, her final wallow, the feel of his palm on her fingers, the feel of her spine against his fingers, his profession of her beauty, his resurfacing pain, this perhaps was as fitting an end as any. Brushing against each other on the crowded floor, half-blinded by the chandeliers and the kindling of new but futile desires, both now imagined they were dancing with the other.

There, he caught a glimpse of her shoulder blade.

And she saw that the heat in the room darkened the hair on his nape.

And it was enough for now. There was nothing more.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Once so much to each other! Now nothing!... There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement._


	6. Chapter 6

i.

He was running.

The rhythm of his feet pounded in his head, slightly out of step with the bleak blare of Radiohead in his ear. It was dark yet, the sky a blanket of sodden gray, the trees and shrubbery of Central Park shrouded in the nebulous fog of the pre-dawn of 5 a.m.. He meditatively watched the cloud of his breath chugging out in spurts ahead of him, leading the way,

away,

away,

_away from her._ He was heedless of the burning in the cavity of his chest (he was no runner, after all), the faceless shadows eyeing him as easy prey, the chill that overpowered the rising heat of his exertions. Logan felt he could run the 1.5 mile circumference of the trail many times over, if only to get away from her.

He ran to shake off the weight of her palm in his. It had pinned him down on his bed, where he spent the last four hours in the pretense of sleep, motionless, while his mind churned and played and fought with new and vivid images of her. Behind his closed lids he saw—the curve of her back when she arched her body away from David's as they danced. (Surely she did that? He wasn't just imagining the space she had put between them?) And then, she had shrugged her shoulders and laughed helplessly, rosily tipsy and mouth open and all, at something Finn had whispered in her ear much later on in the evening. (Good man, Finn, for making her laugh. He only wished he'd quit agonizing over what it was she found so funny.) Finally, the coup de grace by the front door, when she put her hand on Louisa's arm to kiss her cheek goodbye, so easily like an old friend. He had thought that she would—that he might feel her breath on his face—but then she stepped back and crossed her arms in front of her chest and said formally (so very formally), "Congratulations again, Logan. Good night, thank you, etc. etc."_ Etc., etc._ He was at first disgruntled—did they not renew…_something_, their acquaintance, in the library? What's up with all the studied _politeness?_ But then he was belatedly grateful that she did not touch him. (Well, except for her hand on his hand.) As it was, as he shook David's shoulder and closed the door on them, Logan already knew he wouldn't be sleeping that night. He would be wondering how her breath might have tasted on his face.

The aggravation of mere sleeplessness became progressively worse, however, as the night wore on. His conscious mind had, at some point, fought the good fight and finally succumbed to some subconscious, lucid reverie of the same-but-different Rory (…her eyes were so blue, even at one in the morning). But Louisa, triumphant and alive over the success of the evening, had chosen this moment to snake her arm around his waist, and aggressively grasped him beneath the waistband of his boxers. He was erect, of course; his body was flooded with Rory. She began stroking him; he let her. He wanted to be relieved of the tightness in his heart, be purged of all feeling and memory until he was numb, so then perhaps he can sleep. Perhaps if he came, then he can move on with his life as it was before this evening. He felt her straddle his leg, quicken her motions. It won't be long now. Logan groaned, dug his head back into the pillow (buried his face in her neck now exposed by her short, dark hair). He grasped Louisa's hand, to guide her. And then, just like that, his eyes flew open, and he flung her hand away from him.

"Baby, what's wrong?" Louisa whispered, surprised, in the dark. They were both breathing heavily.

It was her hand, of course. It was all wrong. Logan sat up and swung his legs to the floor. His right hand shook, clenched, unclenched; it had so recently felt Rory's palm after all, after seven years. It felt like some form of infidelity on his part to sully the memory so soon. _Fuck the irony_, he thought. This is like some stupid, horror B movie: her hand had possessed his and was now haunting his sex life. (She, of course, would get a kick out of that, and might have made up a sordid title to go along with it.)

"Nothing. I'm just tired," he replied. He looked over his shoulder at Louisa, her blonde hair long and tousled like a halo about her face, the thin strap of her negligee slipping, nearly exposing a breast.

"I had a conversation with Mitchum this evening, and I have a lot on my mind. Go back to sleep."

This moment was a milestone in their relationship, he knew. Perhaps she did, too. For the first time since they had been together, he was disinterested in having sex with her. She presented a veritable vision of seduction on his bed, his surgically enhanced and designed for pleasure wife-to-be, and all he felt was a desperate need to sleep. Dreamless. Which was impossible.

So he said, "I think I'll work for a while. I have some e-mails to write." He leaned towards her and kissed her on the mouth, endeavoring to make it as tender as possible.

(And Louisa, reasoning that unconsummated sex was one of those _issues_ probably all married couples experienced at some point, fell happily asleep at the thought of being a married, even if sex-less, couple.)

He didn't even bother going to his desk when he left the bedroom, however. He scrounged under cushions and rugs for balled-up socks left undiscovered by the housekeeper who came to clean the apartment everyday. He stuffed his feet in a brown and a gray, into his basketball shoes, his iPod in his shorts.

And that's how Logan came to be running at 5 a.m. along the lower reservoir trail of Central Park, in his t-shirt, boxers, and mismatched socks. He was running away from Rory. Running in a circle. Running toward her, but then again, away from her.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ii.

Meanwhile, she was dying.

Rory awakened to the thud of her book falling to the floor beside her bed. She opened her eyelid a crack—she couldn't seem to open it any wider—and reached down an arm to retrieve the book. Her body protested, her bones creaking at their joints. Ouch, oh, crap.

She tried saying it aloud, clearing her throat as best as she can, wincing at the jagged pain that wrought: "Crap." It sounded like a fatty burp, distinctly frog-like. Not good. Next she pried her hot and crusty eyelids open, her head cracking neatly from the effort. (Double crap.) She shut her eyes again, and burrowed deeper under her covers (oh, the pain). Her feet were clammy and cold, in contrast to everything else feeling parched and dry. She longed for a glass of water to refresh her mouth, but was too achy and cowardly to walk the half-dozen paces to her kitchen. This was the mother of all Miss Patty's Founders' Day punch hangovers. Or, it might just be the flu. A hangover-flu combo, then.

Not quite awake, she effortlessly drifted back to sleep, back to her dream of Anne and Wentwo—oh, _crap_.

Akin perhaps to how life flashed before one's eyes, the revelations, the dancing, his hair and his words from the evening before scrambled up from her gut to her throat, that she very nearly threw up on the Austen that lay innocently on the floor. The nausea passed, thankfully, but not the lingering sensation that something was horribly wrong with her, quite apart from her hangover-flu.

He had said, _you're beautiful. _And, _you're right, it was nothing._

And she had said, _congratulations, Logan._

Yes, she might as well sleep forever. And she seemed in good shape to do so.

Unfortunately, like one other person in another part of the city, her twin-in-agony (if not her soulmate, who by now was taking a shower and about to have breakfast with his fiancee), sleep was not to be had. Her phone began to ring shrilly, persistently, wearing down her determination to die.

It was Lorelai.

"It's 7:30, and you've left me in enough suspense. So come on, spill."

Judging by the volume and rate of her speech, Rory surmised that by now her mother had had between 2 to 3 cups of coffee.

"Hrblr," she croaked.

"What? Come on, up, up…I'm walking on sunshine, wooh-oh…" Lorelai impatient, in sing-song.

Rory, wincing, tried again. "I fl hrblr."

"Fine. Be uncooperative and hungover. Luke is dropping me off at the Dragonfly, then I'm calling you right back. You'd better be ready to tell me all about last night's _haute couture_, whether you got stuffed or starved over the precious _hors d'oeuvres_, and whether our bubbly girl is oozing with—what's that?—_je ne sais quoi__…" _

"French vanilla in your coffee?"

"Aha, she speaks! And in such a lovely bedroom voice. Oh God—I didn't interrupt a tete-a-tete with David, did I?"

"No." Far from it.

"Because you'll be telling me all about Logan too, and it would be too weird, and we'd have to speak in code, although that's always mentally stimulating and a refreshing change from sudoku. Oh man—okay, okay, okay, got to go!"

"Code for 'Luke's glaring at me because we're running late'?"

"C'est la vie!"

Mercifully, the wake-up call ended. Rory remained cocooned in her blankets, eyes still closed, wondering what story she would regale her mother with. Lorelai had never completely warmed up to Logan in all the years they were together, and yet, that was the only real story to be told from the evening before. Would it be worth telling, moreover, now that it was all completely moot? She could, instead, talk to Lorelai about Louisa's wonderful breasts and her dalliance with Will. Yet in the throes of her flu, heaped atop her deep, abiding sensation of emptiness, Rory could not help but long for the comfort of her mother.

"So were you actually asleep when I called? It's not like you to sleep past 7 on a Saturday when there's an entire list of things to be ticked off your to-do list."

"I was dreaming, actually," Rory began slowly. "Of Wentworth."

"Oh tell me about it, hon. The idea that he's gay is still giving me nightmares."

"Not Miller. Frederick Wentworth."

"Please tell me that's not a real person's name."

"Forget it," Rory replied, cut short by her hacking cough.

"Are you sure you've taken something?" Lorelai asked worriedly. "Drink lots of fluids, stay in bed, call the venerable Dr. Paris Gellar in case of an emergency. And you'd better do as I say, because you know I don't get to play Mom with you anymore and it would hurt my feelings if you didn't."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm in bed."

She was, actually, with her laptop on her lap and a slew of papers spread out over her blanket. "Called the drugstore for Nyquil, aspirin, cough syrup, OJ, chicken noodle soup, half-a-dozen boxes of Kleenex. I never realized how poorly stocked my house was. Wonder who I got that from?"

"Hey, feelings hurting! But what happened, hon? Yesterday you were completely fine. That party must have been completely horrid for you to get so sick. I knew some special kind of immune system was a prerequisite to mingling with those people. I myself could only take it for the first 16 years of my life, then only on Fridays thereafter."

"It wasn't so horrid. Louisa's nice. Friendly. A bit intimidating—I haven't known anyone so friendly. I'm sure I've never blown kisses to Lane that many times. She was an art history major in Cambridge, museum curator, and went out with Prince Will for a time," Rory swallowed painfully as she rattled off the biographical details.

"She sounds horrid. I bet she looks like Queen Elizabeth. And pray tell, why are we talking in a clipped British accent?"

"Well you were the one who first said 'horrid'." Rory doodled on the touchpad of her computer, spinning the cursor around in circles. "So. That's it."

"Well what about Logan?" Lorelai asked casually. "Was he devastatingly handsome? Did you blow any kisses to each other?"

Rory remained silent, and struggled. _She_ felt horrid—the mad mix of sadness and wanting and regret was coagulating like phlegm in her chest. She wished her cough syrup would come soon and melt it away; she wished her mother had not brought up the image of Logan juxtaposed with blown kisses.

"Uh-oh," Lorelai said. "Nu-uh. Silence among Gilmore women is never a good sign."

"Frederick Wentworth," Rory managed to whisper.

"Freder—okay please, enlighten your mother, whose only use for literature is to use them as paper weights. I'm guessing it's literature, and old, because no one in his right mind would use that name in recent centuries. Unless you're hot and dreamy and in prison."

"Austen, Mom." And thus began the story Rory decided she would tell her mother. "Wentworth and Anne loved each other. They were to marry—" another hacking cough, "—but Anne was persuaded to break it off. Wentworth went off with the navy, came back after years and years and now comes courting this Louisa Musgrove, who happens to be the sister-in-law of Anne's sist…"

"Hold on. _Louisa_ Musgrove? Okay, you're creeping me out. Tell me Scarlett O'Hara's life was patterned after mine."

"Yeah, weird, isn't it? And stupid. But this is just me making sense of things the only way I know how. I could have picked up the Dalai Lama's biography and see my story there. That would have been better, actually, have me some zen and all. But last night wasn't fiction, though."

"I want to know more about _Anne_," Lorelai hedged. "So. She and Wentworth see each other again, and she realizes…what? That she's never stopped loving this guy and all that?"

"Anne realizes that she…Well no, actually there was _no_ sudden realization. She had always known. That there was no one like Wentworth. Nothing like how they were together. That was it, Anne's one shot at true love." Rory was punctuating each sentence with deep and laborious sighs. "And she remembered how they—they took care of each other, you know?"

As there was nothing but silence at the other end of the line, eyes watery with fever began to spill and stream. The dam had effectively been burst. "When he, he shattered his knee and his ribs. Whenever she was all confused about what to do with herself, he was just _there_ for her. And, and…they lived _together_. And so much for London, ha! He wanted to marry her. There was a horse, and an avocado tree. And then…and then…oh crap, my nose is all clogged. His tie was yellow, and graduation was horrible. I can't breathe."

She picked up a random, crumpled piece of tissue amidst her papers, before resuming the free association in emotional delirium.

"So then, when Anne saw him again, all this _feeling_ just resurfaced. She was okay, really, more than okay after all this time. I mean, you can't pine for someone for seven years unless you're insanely pathetic, right? She was okay, and, and, and hey, she even has a boyfriend now." A small hiccup punctuating the end, to convince her mother.

As Rory paused to blow vigorously into her tissue, Lorelai ventured to speak in a tone of measured concern she imagined psychotherapists use (saying things probably no psychotherapist said). "Oh. Wow. _Wow._ Last night must have been pretty heavy. Feelings resurfacing, huh. Like pond scum? Oh, Anne."

"Yeah. She's feeling kind of low, I guess," Rory said, calmer. _I'm_ _sad, there, I'm owning it._ "She's pretty sick too, which is probably compounding things, making them seem worse than they are. A bottle of cough syrup and 48 hours of sleep and she'll be fine. She'll bounce back and write that piece on Hillary's new environmental policy before her deadline."

"A bottle of cough syrup and Anne would be dead," Lorelai interjected. "Or high, which isn't too bad, considering. So would Anne have any insight as to what Wentworth might be thinking? Was he a jerk when they saw each other? He must have been angry that she broke things off. Enough not to have gotten in touch with her all those years."

"Well Anne never called him, either." _Nor was she the one who broke things off._ "No, he wasn't an ass." _He told me I was beautiful._ "They were very…civil."

"Civil, as in civil, or as in I-really-can't-stand-you-but-I'm-being-polite civil, or as in I'm-so-in-love-with-you-but-I-can't-let-it-out civil?"

Their goodbyes, indeed, were very _civil_. Rory coughed yet again, her torso clamping down. She fell back on her pillows, feeling tired and dehydrated. "Have I mentioned the very important detail that Wentworth is in fact getting married to Louisa, and therefore I think we should now stop talking about this?"

"Oh. Was that how the story actually ended? Thank God I never read that miserable piece of literature."

"No. Anne and Wentworth got back together, actually, somewhere between page 205 and 219."

"Hm," Lorelai mused.

"But then that's Jane Austen for you. Now that's fiction. Bye, Mom."

"Okay, can I say something though? A few things. One, do not down a bottle of cough syrup. If not for me, then think of Ian who might lose precious scoring points with the girls in his day care for not having a fabulous older sister who's just like Lois Lane. Two, I love Anne, so very much. I think she's strong and accomplished and can write a story for herself that is tons better than this Jane who thinks it's a good idea to name her hero Wentworth. There must be more to life than a…a…_Wentworth_!" Lorelai said with disdain.

Rory, finally, wheezed out a chuckle.

"And third," Lorelai added, "I want you to remember why Anne turned down Wenty in the first place, and the good that came out of that. You _are_ in a good place, hon. It's no use thinking of what might have been. No regrets, okay?"

It took some time for Rory to respond, time she spent looking at the left hand on her lap, the hand that touched his for a time. "No regrets, Mom. Bye. I love you, too."

"Oh wait!" Lorelai suddenly cried in excitement. "I do have a literary analogy, too. This is just like when Ross was about to marry Emily, and then Rachel thought that she—"

"That's not literature; that's TV."

"Potatoe, potatoh."

"Bye, Mom."

"You know Rachel really didn't want Ross—not until five more seasons later—she just _thought_ she did, but it was just this whole idea of him getting married and something about pigs and nests—"

"Mom! Bye! Bed rest!" Rory rasped, turning her phone off.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_There must be more to life than a Wentworth._

As she gingerly dug herself deeper in her bed, Rory pondered the eternal wisdom of a mother's words. The silence in her apartment was deafening; it closed in on her already congested head, punctuated by the ticking of the clock on her wall and the distant electric murmur of her refrigerator. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. Minutes later, she opened them again, knowing that what she wanted to do was most counterproductive given her current physical and emotional state, yet knowing, too, that she will not get any physical nor emotional rest otherwise. If anything, it might hush her disquiet, as it did last night. She leaned over and carefully procured _Persuasion_ from its place beneath her lamp.

Flipping through the first dozen or so pages, she found what she wanted.

_Anne, at seven and twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen…She was persuaded that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays, and disappointments, she should have yet been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement, than she had been in the sacrifice of it. _

There. No regrets, Mom. Except that your Anne might have been happier, is all. Were Wentworth to ask again (at her sickbed, no less), her answer would be…well, irrelevant.

…_she felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. __How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,--how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!--She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older--the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning._

And so, barring any tragedies involving Robitussin, this is what the older, wiser, big sister Rory would tell Ian's 5-year-old girlfriends in his day care: Do not be afraid of your future, do not be afraid of love. The Wentworth in your life is worth any sacrifice, any risk, any desire, any hope. Let nothing persuade you otherwise.

With that, Rory tucked the book under the pillow beside her. She had been overly cautious, living by her Pro-Con lists, afraid to risk her wide-open future. She lost Logan in the process. Like Anne, she will make her peace with that. Indeed, she will move on with the next chapter of her life. She felt calm now, and drowsy. Later when she wakes up, she will feel better.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

iii.

Logan felt better. All energy spent, he was single-mindedly occupied by the steady beat of his heart returning to its normal rhythm, the increasingly pleasant soreness of his calf muscles, the sharp pins of hot shower spray sloughing off his cold sweat. The sheer physicality of what he had accomplished—a 3-miles-plus run—overcame every other emotion and thought, the sensation in his hand and groin. His system was removed of Rory. Which was the plan. It really wasn't so difficult, he thought with some arrogance; he's been without for seven years.

As he dressed, he looked diligently to the day ahead. A Saturday it was, but as the newly-appointed CEO of Huntzberger Publishing, there was no such thing as a weekend. He had two meetings scheduled that day—one with the Chairman of the Board to discuss issues that Mitchum brought up with him the evening before (of course, at his very engagement party), the other with the officers of some foundation for some community of some country in Africa (all very worthy, he was sure, no less than Brangelina in their roster) hoping to establish a partnership with HPG. He haphazardly ran his hand through his wet hair (and yes—it was now just a hand).

He walked out of the bedroom in quick strides, not wanting to break his momentum, only to slow down at the muffled voice of a man coming from the dining area. It was David. Logan stopped at the doorway, his renewed bravado falling a notch.

"Good morning, baby!" Louisa called out cheerily, waving her tea cup in the air. "Have a little something before you go. I had Marissa whip up this lovely Spanish omelette. It goes well with the homemade bread that Mom sent us."

"Homemade. Impressive." Logan pulled a chair beside David. "Hey," they exchanged, as if seeing David having breakfast in his apartment was commonplace. He had a feeling it will be. He wondered idly whether he would always come alone, or would Rory one day be eating breakfast at his table…_Damn, why is he here?_

"So when does Vanessa find the time?" He poured himself some coffee.

"Oh God, Mother cannot fry an egg, you must know that, much less bake bread from scratch. So anyway, I invited David over so we can plan our ski holiday next weekend."

Logan looked at Louisa, his hand frozen above the bread basket. "Skiing? Louisa, you know how hard it is for me to get away. I don't think I can do an entire weekend."

"Oh come on, Logan," Louisa wheedled. "Amber and Hans are coming over from Geneva for the wedding."

"Then I'm sure Amber and Hans have done enough skiing in their lifetime. Lots of snow in the Swiss Alps." He spread a generous pat of butter on his bun, not realizing until then how ravenous he was after all his running. "I have a lot of homework to do. You go. And David."

"And Rory. Then I'll be the only one without a partner there, which is a bit odd seeing that the entire purpose of this trip is to meet you. You'll have time enough to be a doddering, boring executive of a husband _after_ we're married."

At the mention of Rory, Logan bit off an extra large hunk of his bread and chewed meditatively. More reason for him not to go, really. Except…Rory _skiing?_ That might be worth seeing.

"Where?" he finally swallowed.

"Well we were thinking Aspen, but that might be too overexposed. We wouldn't want to come across people we're not actually planning to invite."

"Gee, I thought we got the entire Western hemisphere covered, and parts of the East to boot," Logan said with a worried frown, as Louisa stuck out her tongue at him.

"Whistler might be too large," David said. "And Vail? We're not sure yet; we'll ask our friends. But what do you think, Logan? Louisa told me you're into all these outdoor and extreme sports and--"

"That's what brought us together, right babe? We were skydiving buddies." Louisa interrupted, brushing Logan's hand. "I weigh like a bird and couldn't do it alone."

"So you might be the person to ask," David finished.

"I haven't been skiing around these parts for years," Logan shrugged. "So next weekend then?" He fished out his Blackberry and set about fiddling with his calendar.

Five, six days more, and then he'll see her again. The prospect filled him with equal parts dread and anticipation, an intoxicating cocktail that made the stomach clench, and he couldn't decipher whether these were good or bad feelings to have. Either way, the wait will most likely translate to a stretch of five, six sleepless nights. He wondered whether new running shoes might be a worthy investment (quite forgetting that the purpose of his run that very morning was to eliminate sleepless nights and need for more running).

"Well, here's the thing," David started, "Turns out that Rory is sick. Really sick. Called her when I got here and she sounded terrible, like a flu. So next weekend…I don't know. It depends on how she is. But then you can go on without us anyway. It's fine. Rory's not into skiing."

Sick? _Oh, no,_ Logan thought, spontaneously looking up from his Blackberry to scowl at the bearer of bad tidings. _You waited until your second cup of coffee before telling us about Rory? Creep!_

"Oh, that's awful!" Louisa said, saving Logan from expressing a stronger expletive that would have seemed an inappropriate reaction from an old college acquaintance. "But last night…"

"I know. I wonder how it happened that she became so sick. Last night she was fine, very fine. She even said she wasn't tired from all the dancing when I brought her back to her apartment."

_I know__ why she's sick_, Logan thought suddenly, a strange, brief excitement punctuating the bothersome unease he felt over her ill-being. Only. I. Know. _She was too long out in the cold._ He felt some secret satisfaction at knowing the answer, the proud second-grader in the classroom of duds. Or rather, only the both of them knew, he and Rory. That was more satisfying still. _The skin of her back was very cold._ He reflexively reached for his coffee cup to warm his fingers off the memory.

"I wouldn't have left her if she was starting to feel bad," David was saying, a tad defensively. Logan had been staring at him accusingly.

Had David been more solicitous with Rory and in fact stayed with her the night, Logan could not tell how he might have reacted. But in fact, they didn't spend the night together. (A childish 'yes!' erupted somewhere in Logan's chest.) Despite the painful blister on his heel from that morning, despite _everything_, that bit of information was a lone bright spot in Logan's day, and made the breakfast with David worthwhile.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

iv.

They decided to wait for more snow. And they decided to wait for Rory's recovery (or rather, Louisa and David decided; Logan sagely chose to be noncommital on the issue). Waiting was not one of Logan's strong points, however. It made him restless.

"Total revenues grew in July and August, advertising softened in September, which had a significant effect on the quarter," Logan was explaining to Robert Daniel. "Retail advertising declined especially because the economy started slowing down."

Logan approached his floor-to-ceiling windows at the Manhattan vista, and wondered where in the city she was. What used to frustrate him when Rory got sick was that she tended to work anyway, while sick in bed, seeing it as an opportunity to "catch up". (He can see her now, tapping madly away at her laptop in bed, surrounded with balled-up tissues.) She'd neglect to take her meds, forget even a drink of water, survive on her crumbly unpopped Pop-Tarts, and--

"Logan?"

"Huh?" He spun around and stared at the overweight sixty-something man seated on his black leather couch. The poor man's collar seemed tight, like a garrote, causing his head to look large and reddish like an oversized tomato. For a moment, Logan forgot who it was and what he was doing there.

"You were saying? About revenues."

Robert Daniel looked skeptically at the young man who cut a damned handsome figure before him. He looked like a poster boy for the all-American, Ivy League, my-rich-papa's-handed-me-over-the-conglomerate school. He spoke and carried himself with confidence, was begrudgingly impressive even, but right now he simply looked confused and antsy. Like he needed to be someplace else. (A weekend trip to Vegas with his frat buddies?)

"Right. Our online revenues demonstrated very strong growth though, up nearly 20 percent in that quarter, which really pushes us squarely in the digital era of journalism. Do you still know anyone who reads the newsprint over breakfast? On the train? People are reading the paper online, all the time, every 20 minutes on their desks. This is where we should focus our efforts, on our Internet-based operations. We haven't been aggressive enough in meeting the demands of the industry."

Robert Daniel grumbled his assent. "We know this was your strength in the European sector. You did good with our England papers. The Board will be interested in your formal presentation."

"Yes. Next Wednesday, then?" Logan cut to the quick for the remainder of the meeting, no longer missing a beat. As the son of Mitchum Huntzberger, Logan knew he had gigantic shoes to fill; he also knew he had to prove that he was up to the task, Huntzberger or not. He could sense that the Board thought him too young and green, never mind that he was prepared for this all his life. He felt old. Seven years older, wiser? Harder.

They shook hands, and Logan felt the older man warm up considerably to him as he said, "Oh by the way, congratulations on your engagement with the Monroes. They're excellent people, excellent."

_Engagement with the Monroes?_, Logan mused as he sat alone at his desk. But of course, the marriage was between the two families, and not merely two people. In fact, the Monroes—who owned the largest chain of luxury hotels in the East Coast—also held significant stock in the Huntzberger Publishing Group. As with many marriages in his slice of the upper-crust, his and Louisa's was by design, orchestrated by their loving parents. That she was as fond of skydiving as he and weighed like a bird (that metaphor, again!) was mere happenstance. That at 23 she was so ready and eager to marry him was, for both their parents, auspicious. That she was a girl who could engage in decent enough conversation and sex was, for Logan, enough. Truly, it was a fated match.

"Would that be all, Mr. Huntzberger?" Sheila the secretary asked, clearing her throat loudly as her boss spaced out for the nth time in the middle of his instructions to her. They were at number 4, "Clear my schedule weekend after next; move my meetings earlier…," at which point he had abruptly stopped. She coughed again.

"You have a cough, Sheila?"

"Me? Oh…uh…a bit, yes." She was flustered by his show of concern. "The transition to winter is always difficult. My allergies, you see, are—"

"Can you make a list?" Logan had stood up, galvanized, and was now pacing back and forth behind his desk. "I need you to put a few things together and have the package delivered as soon as it's ready. Today."

"Oh, of cou—"

"A large bottle of water."

"Water?"

"Water."

"Sparkling? Flavored? Spring? Distilled? Plain?" Sheila stopped, as Logan began to look irritated.

"Just—just water. The normal kind."

"Evian?"

"Fine. And a box of Cocoa Puffs."

"Cocoa Puffs?"

"Yes. The cereal. Kellogs, I believe. The kind you take in a bowl with milk. Stop looking at me like that, and please stop repeating everything I say!"

Sheila uncapped her pen with her mouth and obediently wrote _Cocoa Puffs_ in her notebook. The wealthy, so eccentric! She thrilled at having another anecdote to tell her boyfriend that evening. And so it went. She unquestioningly added:

_Breakfast at Tiffany's_—"the Audrey Hepburn one, not the book" (there is a book?)

jet-puffed marshmallows

the first edition of _Emma_ ("You'd have to get that from my dad's library in Harford")

_The Life of Brian_

milk chocolate Band-aids from The Sweet Life in Hester Street ("Is it still there?")

a dozen sweet (she would have to taste!) pongkan oranges from Chinatown

chicken soup from—("Where do you recommend?")—Edison Café.

She had no idea how she would manage to put that all together in a few hours, but she was loathe to disappoint her new boss. Decorum required her not to ask who it was all for, though she felt fairly ready to burst from her smart little suit at the intrigue, the romance! But was it, in fact, romantic? Audrey Hepburn and the chocolate Band-aids made it seem so. But then jet-puffed marshmallows and Monty Python, not so. Sheila could not decipher the meaning of such a collection, and wisely postponed all speculation, suspended all disbelief that one Louisa Monroe would be the recipient, and set out to do Logan Huntzberger's bidding.

"Uh, Mr. Huntzberger? The card? What do you want me to write…?"

"I'll do it, Sheila. I'll hand it to you when I'm done."

"And where do I send the care package?"

"_Care_ package?"

"Isn't it? I didn't mean to presume."

He shook his head, shrugged away her question. "Can you find me the address of a Lorelai Leigh Gilmore?"

"Very good, sir."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sheila could not decipher the meaning of the odd assortment of foodstuffs and movies, but to Logan, it was an odd potpourri of _her_. Or rather, his knowledge of her. He began to doubt himself, though, the moment Sheila left his office. Would she still enjoy all that? (Damn, he forgot the coffee!) Was he presuming too much, thinking that he knew her still? Would she be upset with him? (Would she remember that they had first danced to _Moon River_, which he knew was in _Breakfast at Tiffany's?)_ And most importantly: Would he be able to explain to her, or to himself, what the hell he was doing sending her a _care_ package?

He felt compelled to do it (compel: to be forced to do something via extreme pressure.) It seemed the only thing that could appease his restlessness; his ceaseless and ridiculous wondering whether she was getting enough fluids was distracting him from the business of running a newspaper. He had thought of going to her, but then—no. He might catch it, fall sick, get re-infected. His defenses had been punctured and can only take so much.

What to write, moreover? That he felt _compelled_ gave him a clue, a way out of the tangled web of feelings, once and for all. Perhaps he was meant to send her this package. Perhaps it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it would put things to its proper close (or to its new beginning?). Right. After seven years, the care package seemed reasonable. A gesture of friendliness, as is befitting between old college acquaintances who once again found themselves in close affinity.

He took out a blank notepaper from his drawer. _Dear Rory._ (Dear? Scratch that.) As he stared at the fingers grasping the pen in front of him, he recalled the moment when she laid her hand on his. She had been saying, _I'm sorry._ For what? Turning down his proposal? For not telling David the truth about them? It didn't matter, Logan realized. All anger—whatever anger there was—has been curiously lost in the space of the previous 12 hours. _Good_, he told himself, this is good. He was getting somewhere. It was simpler to determine what he was _not_ feeling, by principle of elimination, than to determine what it was he _did_ feel (which he really preferred not to dwell on).

And so he would start—or end—by telling her not to feel sorry. It is all better now, as she soon will be.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

**A/N:** I'm so happy to finally bring you the latest chapter. Apologies for the long stretches of time between uploads, but life—you know the spiel. But perhaps you know, or should know, that I finish my fics. So I hoped you enjoyed this relatively longish chapter, and your feedback, as always, sustains me til the next one.


	7. Chapter 7

i.

If life indeed imitated art—as Lorelai pondered with a chill after her conversation with her daughter about one Anne and Wentworth—then it would be remiss to speak of Rory and Logan's Austen without giving voice to the mothers and sisters that inhabited the artist's pages.

There was Honor Huntzberger, for one, who had the privilege of being the first in Logan's family to be introduced to _Rory the girlfriend._ She had liked Rory well enough, and thought her a brave little thing to suffer her mother's disdain and persist in a relationship with her rake of a brother. They never did go shopping, or out to lunch, as she was wont to tell Rory the few occasions that they spoke ("We must go shopping sometime!"). They never did become friends, especially after that sad little fiasco with her admittedly sluttish bridesmaids Walker and Alexandra. But despite this, she could appreciate how…_good_ Rory was for Logan. (God knows how much she and Logan needed a Josh and Rory at some point in their grown-up lives, so crappy was their childhood.) She also knew they wouldn't last.

In the seven or so years since she and Rory last saw each other, Honor had two little daughters with Josh, now her ex-husband. In the stress of divorce (thank God for the prenup!) and the flurry of raising her princesses in a manner befitting their status, Honor could not be blamed for not giving another thought to Rory Gilmore. At Logan's engagement party, she had eyed and coveted the blue-black dress worn by who she thought was merely David Monroe's pretty date.

Shira Huntzberger, on the other hand, knew perfectly well who David Monroe was dancing with at Logan and Louisa's party. And as she calmly sipped her champagne and watched the young couples sashay around the floor, she saw—with a mother's uncanny sixth sense—that her son's self-possessed and carefree air had been disturbed; there was a tell-tale stiffness in the way he held his head and Louisa's hand. Shira watched, and waited, and saw—there it was: as they passed the other couple, her son had looked at the dark-haired woman and caught her eye for an infinitesimal moment. Their eyes darted away, but not before their countenances changed, flushed, glowed with some preternatural light in awareness of the other.

"Vanessa—" Shira turned to the woman beside her. "Tell me, is that the Gilmore girl David is dancing with?"

"Oh, I don't know her. David has yet to introduce her to me. But Elise did tell me that David had a new girlfriend he seemed crazy about." She dropped her voice in a conspiratorial whisper. "You know she's dying for David to settle down, and she's positively green with envy that my Louisa will be first. But—did you say Gilmore?"

At the mention of David—her prospective daughter-in-law's cousin—possibly settling down with the woman who once spurned her son, Shira's mind hummed with meditated intervention.

"Yes, Gilmore. Emily Gilmore's granddaughter."

"That's wonderful, then," Vanessa replied. "We know Emily and Richard. It's too bad they're on holiday in Australia, though my complexion does hanker for warmer climes at this time of year."

She looked at David's partner with renewed interest and appreciation, complacent in that single piece of information regarding her bloodline. It assured her that the desirable and _right_ characteristics have been bred into the girl.

"We do know Emily and Richard," Shira began. "But—oh, I don't know…" she trailed off, sipping her champagne with a worried air.

Such hesitation predictably piqued the listener's attention. Vanessa turned to Shira with focused attentiveness. "What do you mean? What is it?"

"Well the granddaughter did not grow up with Emily and Richard. They weren't even close. Her mother—you might have forgotten?—her mother cut off her relationship with them when she got pregnant _at 16_. The girl was quite wild. Headstrong. Broke her mother's heart."

Vanessa puckered her forehead. "Oh right, I do remember. She's about my age. Oh, and—why, she's the owner of this quaint little bed and breakfast Charles was raving about!" Her face brightened with remembrance. "He swore he'd quit building his massive hotels after staying there a night…_as if!_ The Dragonfly I think it's called, right?"

This was _not_ the reaction Shira had been hoping for.

"Right," she replied flatly. "It's _this_ daughter that worries me. I've heard…well, perhaps it isn't right to worry Elise needlessly." Her lips worked themselves to an effortful smile.

"What is it, Shira? If it concerns David then I think she has the right to know. I can tell her about it if you're uncomfortable. The girlfriend…there's something wrong?"

That was the reaction Shira had been hoping for.

"Well I've heard that she's quite the—what's the term? Golddigger sounds so crass—" she muttered audibly. "'Ambitious', one might say. She had a boyfriend, once, they were to be engaged, I believe—"

At this point, Shira genuinely hesitated. Would she sacrifice the reputation of her son to save him? _Oh, to have a cigarette! _Vanessa was looking at her expectantly. Shira decidedly steered her towards a quiet corner of the room.

"The boy lost a lot of money, a failed venture in his father's business. He was—he was _fired_, and was left practically penniless and without future prospects. Well the girl had her heart set on entering the boy's—I mean, _our_, you know. This." She looked around the room. "She didn't grow up into it, after all. She had been living with the boy, enjoying all the advantages that a relationship with him provided, until—well, until he was virtually disowned, that is." Shira pressed her lips together nervously (a cigarette, after!).

"She left him because of that?"

"Well I don't know if it was _just_ because of that—they had so many other troubles besides—but she broke off their engagement very soon after that." Shira shuddered. "You recall that Emily had been hosting all these events in the last few years? It seems the granddaughter wants to—I don't know—settle down, as you say. She's a newspaper _reporter_." She uttered the last sentence with emphasis, to express the desperation of her situation.

"Who was the boy?" Vanessa asked plaintively.

Shira bent her head closer to Vanessa's. "I just—I just couldn't tell you. The parents are very close, very close friends. But he's gone out of the country, so devastated he was. He had turned his back on everything, because of her. I haven't heard anything about him, really."

Vanessa was troubled, but not fully persuaded of the gravity of the situation. "But Elise—she tells me that this girl is quite wonderful, and that David has been so happy…"

"Tell me, Vanessa, tell me. Does _that_ look like a couple very much in love?" Shira pressed Vanessa's arm to turn her, so that the woman once again had a view of the dancing couples.

David's gaze was undisputably doting as he looked down at Rory's face. He was craning his head and leaning his body towards her—yet how awkward it appeared to the observant eye, because that eye would have likewise discerned that the girl was arching her body away from his, her posture quite unnatural. Her head, rather than tilted upwards to gaze at her partner's face, was levelled at the height of his neck. Her eyes (how shockingly blue they were!) were shifting here and there, but alighted most often at some distant point beyond David's shoulder. Rory seemed distracted and far, far away. She looked, least of all, in love.

"Oh," was all Vanessa thought to say, as she looked back at Shira. (Had she happened to look at the other couple, she might have witnessed the same vacant expression in her future son-in-law's eyes, and experienced the greater shock.) Love was certainly neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for marriage, but to flout it so blatantly was just so…inappropriate. Shira shook her head sideways, ever so discreetly, to convey her sympathy. Then she drifted away, in search of some space and a smoke. Her deed was done. Neither Vanessa nor Elise would require further persuasion.

And so, Rory found herself soon to be shunned from the society she never sought to enter. In refusing to marry Logan Huntzberger, she had committed the gravest mistake, one that any mother would be hard-pressed to forgive. Here is the real story, the one that had been twisted and turned in Shira's head: because of her, or inspired by her, Logan abandoned his destiny and left his father's company. Because of her, Logan transported himself across the country and suffered heavily, wasting away two years of his life for love of her. Who did she think she was, the undeserving, worthless woman!, Shira thought, dragging deeply onto her cigarette. She must never enter their circle and wreak her havoc again. Especially not at this point in her son's life, poised as he is at the threshold of personal and professional success.

Of the smallest consequence to Rory was the impending end of her relationship with David (since she was steps ahead of Shira in planning it). Of the greatest consequence is that with its demise, any link between her and Logan will also be severed. Perhaps for good, this time around. Perhaps for the good of everyone, the mothers Lorelai and Shira would agree on the sole point. Then again, Austen mothers are quite notorious for not knowing best.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ii.

The buzzing in Rory's head was incessant. She shifted painfully in search of a softer spot to cushion her tender joints. Her self-medication thus far seemed unsuccessful; she had pined for slumber deep and impervious to the…there it was again, buzz, buzz, _buzzzz!_ As she gradually surfaced to consciousness, she realized that the pounding of her head was of a different, separate rhythm than the buzzing in her ear. That in fact the buzz did not emanate from inside her, but from her door, a million paces beyond her bed of balled-up tissues.

_Go away!_ she moaned, tugging the covers over her head. Yet whoever it was at her door was relentless. Oh joy, maybe it's her neighbor Mrs. Marjorie Bleeker come to retrieve her Victoria Secret catalogue that accidentally fell into Rory's mailbox now and then. Or—bother—maybe it's an emergency. A fire, or some other matter of life or death. Whatever it was, Rory's resolute conscience could not keep her from answering her persistent caller.

She shuffled out her bedroom, dragging her quilt behind her like a cape. She opened her door with the chain yet fastened, and beheld the scrunched-up face of a young woman in the gap. Her cheekbones were pushed up under her eyes in a grimace that alternated between annoyance and apologetic anxiety.

"Can I help you?" Rory croaked.

"Are you Lorelai Leigh Gilmore?" the woman asked with some impatience. (She was, after all, illegally parked at the curb below the apartment building.)

"Uh, I'm having a bit of an out of body experience right now," she replied thickly. "But I do think that's me and my name, yes."

"Really? No shit," Shiela let out in disbelief, her romantic visions disintegrating as she contemplated puffy eyes and red nose, hair plastered on one side and flying any which way on the other. This bedraggled vision was to be the recipient of her carefully assembled and lovingly wrapped care package. (Oh why, Mr. Huntzberger, why?)

"I'm dying here, what do you want?" Rory finally snapped.

"Oh, sorry. This here is for you." She pointed to a large box by her feet.

Rory peered down and saw that the sizable package was simply but elegantly wrapped in cream colored paper and thick chocolate brown string. "Goody. Is that the home theatre system I ordered?"

"No," Shiela huffed indignantly.

"Um. Okay. What is it? Who is it from? Do I sign, pay…?" She would be rid of the woman and leave the pretty box outside for now. It looked heavy, and she hadn't the energy to bring it in, nor an iota of curiosity stirring in her drug-addled brain. It was probably from her mother, and this rude woman a Fed-Ex messenger in training.

"It's from Mr. Logan Huntzberger." She said the name with haughty flourish, calculated to make the grumpy, unkempt Ms. Lorelai Leigh Gilmore feel either deeply obliged or ashamed to be gifted anything by such a personage.

But Rory merely felt stupid. "What did you say?" Her sense of hearing was quite unfocused, blurry, connected as it was to her clogged nose.

"The package is from Mr. Logan Huntzberger. It contains some perishables, and things that _melt_, so you'd better bring it in. Okay?" Shiela looked at her wristwatch, saw that it was 8:42 in the evening, and blew out a sigh of relief. Never mind that she had probably earned herself a parking ticket and was an hour late for dinner with her boyfriend; she was able to fulfill Mr. Huntzberger's request that the package be delivered today.

"Oh, and you need to get back to bed or hop in the shower," she addressed Rory petulantly before turning to go. "You look horrible."

"Thank you," Rory murmured absent-mindedly.

She prodded the package into her apartment with a bare foot. Eyeing the square, solid thing for several moments, she felt a deep flush of warmth creep up from her belly to suffuse her clammy neck, face, and other extremities. Her heart began to thump audibly in her chest, and for the first time that day, she became aware of the urge to pee. Her physiological system switched on, hummed alive and—not kicking—but in relative riot compared to her comatose state the last 12 hours. She settled in a heap beside the package.

Last night—she pondered with her head resting against the box—she and Logan were thrown together by some bizarre force of circumstance. But this gesture went beyond the blind machinations of fate. There was purpose, forethought, intent in the production of this package. _It was for her._ How well she remembered Logan and his little (well, large, actually) stunts and gifts. What can _this_ mean? It seemed best to open it and be done with it. Yet how she dreaded crushing—or inflaming—the swelling little wave in her chest. And so she overthought it a while longer, her ear pressed to the carton.

A small envelope had been inserted under the string, and inside, of course, a note. Rory ran the pads of her fingers over the paper's cottony, fibered texture; she could see the threads up close. She put it to her nose, inhaling lightly, as if to discern by scent the sentiments of the hand that previously held it. She caught, instead, a whiff of his after-shave. And vaguely, chicken soup.

_------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------_

Rory,

I'm sorry to hear that you're sick. You, on the other hand, have no reason to be sorry. Not for anything, anymore. (Except—for being stubborn and staying out in the cold.) It isn't anger or resentment I feel for you. The antics of Holly Golightly or Emma Woodhouse should cheer you. Drink the water. Try to have some of the soup before the marshmallows. Be okay.

Logan.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amidst the very cordial health-related admonitions cramming the little notecard (in truth, it seemed the writer had much more to say, but did not know what to say, and so ended up saying things that did not need to be said), one sentence stood out to Rory. The words linked hands with the little wave that hung suspended in her chest, cranking up a foolish happy dance.

_It isn't anger or resentment I feel for you._

Rory loved words, and had a peculiar obsession with grammar. (There were the various editions of Strunk and White's _Elements of Style_ scattered around her home and office; Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ in a venerated space on her shelf reserved for favorite non-fiction. The Grammar Girl podcast in her iPod.) She could not help, therefore, analyzing the sentence's structure to pieces.

He could have said, for instance, _I am not angry or resentful towards you_. Or: _I do not feel anger or resentment for you._ Or: _I feel neither anger nor resentment for you._ And _Anger or resentment I feel not for you_ (if he were feeling rather more Shakespearean).

But instead, he wrote it the way he did: _It isn't anger or resentment I feel for you. _Hanging, somewhat ambiguous and roundabout, it made ever so small but meaningful a difference. It insinuated, intentionally or not, that there _were_ feelings…

Filled with his large, expansive handwriting, the letters cursive but disconnected (like gaps in teeth, she once complained), the card left no more space for Logan to explicate nor Rory to decipher what feelings there _were_. Yet whatever they are, they are _not_ bad.

Could he have known she would read his note in this way? (Why yes, of course.)

At the wake of this conclusion, Rory took a quick, warm shower. She then dutifully consumed the entire bowl of chicken soup and two of the dozen oranges. She avoided eating the candy for now, not because he no longer knew what she liked, but because her throat felt too raw for sweets. By the time Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak kissed in the rain, Rory felt her sinuses clear and she was nearly, very nearly, okay. (All in keeping with the directive to _Be okay._) The box she opened had suffused the air with what had been loved and familiar, and the memories were palliative in effect. How uncanny that after all this time, and despite the measure of pain he himself once wrought, Logan still knew how to make her pain go away.

_This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before…he could not be unfeeling…though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed. - Chapter X_

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

iii.

Her call was answered at the fifth ring. Just her luck—she had promised herself she would hold out only until the sixth. Then again, there was no answer, no "Hello". Someone had simply picked up the phone and was waiting for her, the caller, to speak, as though the receiver cannot be bothered to utter a word. The violation of conventional telephone etiquette was disconcerting.

"Uh…hello?" Rory tentatively spoke. "Um, anyone there?"

Silence.

"I must have the wrong number, I'm sorry."

"Rory?"

He was confused. The voice was thoroughly out of context. To hear it rasp into his ear, puncturing the numbers, graphs, percentages of HPG revenues in his head, was surreal.

"Logan?"

"Yes. Rory?"

"Hi! It's, uh, Sunday."

"Okaay…" His mouth spontaneously turned up to smile at her unremarkable introduction. "Um, thanks for letting me know. I was about to miss church. Or brunch. Or whatever it is people do on Sundays."

"I meant I didn't expect you to be at your office."

"And yet you called."

"Yes. I did." _Silly me._

"Unless there was someone else you wanted to speak to? I've got Greg here, but he's washing windows just now."

"I was rather expecting an automaton to answer, kinda like the redhead you sent to do your bidding last night."

"Automaton, really? Been meaning to set her up with Finn. I think she's nice."

"Perhaps she thinks you more charming than I. Hey, Logan—I just wanted to say thank you. For the things you sent me."

"You're welcome. And thanks for thinking me charming."

"I said _she_ finds you charming. So, um…I was thinking we might never see each other again, so I thought I should try to call."

(There were, after all, so many reasons in favor of never seeing each other again. One—or two—would be the quiet pleasure now expanding and gaining speed, thrilling one end of the telephone cable to the other. They were only vaguely aware of how they clung to the sound of the other breathing in their ear, as their own breathing fell short and inadequate.)

"Well that sounds ominous," he said lightly. "Thanks for this last call, then."

"You're welcome."

"Strange that you think we'd never see each other again. Last I heard, we had common bedfellows."

_Not for long,_ Rory thought, with greater relief than regret.

"Yeah, well…I wanted to thank you personally, and not spring it on you in public or in the company of…others."

"Why not?"

"Because I…I was thinking that…I don't know. Not that I want to keep it a secret or anything clandestine like that…"

"Clandestine." He rather enjoyed the sound of it.

"…but the matter of jet-puffed marshmallows and _The Life of Brian_ might get awkward," she continued.

He laughed. "Right. It would ruin you."

"Or you, since you thought to give them as gifts for one practically at her deathbed."

"My reputation has endured worst slander, you know."

"A source of pride, I'm sure. So anyway, that's all."

"Okay."

"Bye now—"

"How are you feeling?" He grasped the phone tighter.

"Better." Brought to mind, she coughed. "And with this voice, I can belt out a mean rendition of 'Bette Davis' Eyes'. It's a wonder you knew it was me."

"I'll know you."

Silence, as Rory unravelled loose threads from her blanket.

"So it was the water?" Logan asked, steering the topic back to the mundane.

"Water?"

"It's French. The best water there is, so my automaton said."

"I do sense a detox effect coming on; my freckles have lightened considerably. As to my flu, the credit goes to Nyquil, I think. But the oranges were good, as was Ms. Golightly."

"So you ate the fruit. I stand corrected, you _have_ changed."

"Oh, yeah. I consumed the box of Cocoa Puffs and realized my tastes now much prefer Apple Jacks and Froot Loops. Older and wiser, as they say."

"I'll make a note of that, for future medicinal purposes. Apples and multi-colored fruit, yes. Raisin Bran?"

"Raisins are the shrivelled-up remains of fruit. They are not fruit in and of themselves."

"Point well taken. So tell me what else you've wised up about in the last seven years." Logan leaned back comfortably in his seat, cradling her voice against his shoulder.

Rory did not feel any wiser. At that very moment, she felt considerably stupid for continuing to converse with Logan, when the sole purpose of her call—to say thank you—had been accomplished 6 lengthy minutes ago.

"I'm afraid the collective pearls of recent years has been confined to the matter of breakfast food."

"Huh. For a _last_ call, this is rather disappointing. It is lacking in all manner of lurid self-revelation or sweeping philosophy about the meaning of life."

"I can still put my bedroom voice to good use and sing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'. Would that do as a parting gift?"

"From you, not quite. I can think of other, better parting gifts and uses of bedroom voices."

The words left his mouth without premeditation as _Rory, bedroom, voice, parting_ coalesced in his head. _Fuck._ What did he just say? How could he have spiralled from breakfast food to bedroom? He had unthinkingly wandered to a part of their history when the telephone served other (clandestine) purposes than conversation.

"Sorry," he muttered, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his desk. Spying a framed photograph of Louisa at the corner, he reached for it and placed it squarely in front of him. Paradoxically, the image of his fiancee before him effectively converted his conversation with Rory to harmless, friendly banter. This didn't mean anything.

"Well. So no song for you, then," Rory replied softly.

"No," Logan said, duly chastised. "You'd better rest, Rory. I'll let you go."

_I'll let you go._

"Wait—" Rory sputtered. She berated herself for seeming quite desperate. But was she not justified by this being their last conversation?

"Yeah?" He can wait.

"Well…uh, what are you doing? In your office. On a Sunday." Lame. Desperate.

"Hm, thought I had told you. I'm hosting this week's _Jane Austen Book Club_," his voice dropped in register. "Pointers? We're doing Emma."

"A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any..." She stopped her nearly involuntary response as Logan laughed.

"Wow. Talk about self-revelation and the meaning of life."

"Logan, that was a serious question."

"Seriously, then. Just work. As usual." He turned somber, looking out at the crisp winter sunshine that shone muted through his tinted windows. "I can't remember the last time I spent a Sunday otherwise."

"Hm, hope is not lost, I'll have you waxing philosophical about your life, yet. Congratulations on becoming CEO of HPG, by the way. It caused quite a stir where I work."

"It's causing a stir where _I_ work." He involuntarily emitted an audible groan as he swivelled to face his computer once more. "I don't think they like me, Ror," he muttered. "Or at least they won't after I've presented my plans for the coming year." Just then, he sounded every bit the 32 year-old CEO neophyte that he was.

"They? You can't be talking of your battalion of adoring automatons, are you?"

"The Board. I'm recommending that some of our papers be let go, and our regional partners need some major reorganizing. I want us to reassess our priorities and focus our resources on online technologies. I just don't know how ready they—we—are for all this change."

"Well, you don't need them to like you. You need to do your job, and they need you and the company to do well. Change can be painful, but necessary. We're all expecting you to rock the journalism world."

"And that's supposed to be comforting? Hey, I hear _The Times_ is among the top ten in presence on the Web. I should be wringing trade secrets from Assistant Editor you."

"Ha, you wish. That would take more than bottled water from the French Alps, mister. _I_ wish I knew trade secrets. But I'm just a humble pawn…"

And so Rory and Logan spoke of cereals, then of work, of nothing, but also, everything. There was no mention of the past, nor any hint of the future, and the Monroes—so instrumental in their accidental reunion—had no place in this perfect, last conversation. They were fearless in their friendliness and flirtatiousness; his impending marriage made them so. Engrossed as they were in this Sunday telephone call, she in her bed and he at his desk, neither were prepared for the rude awakening that was to come in the form of a sing-song—

"Logan, babe! Ready for lunch?"

Louisa swept into Logan's office bearing shopping bags from Saks.

Rory was in the middle of regaling Logan with a picturesque description of the terracotta-orange paint of her living room walls, and had stopped at mid-sentence at the sound of Louisa's voice. Her words, her thoughts, her feelings were effectively doused as if by extremely cold water. She drew her blankets up to her chest in newfound chilly silence, as the sound in her ear grew muffled. Logan had covered his mouthpiece with his hand and was telling Louisa something that Rory could not make out.

"Hey there—not quite ready. Can you give me five minutes to finish this call?"

"Sure, hon. I need to go to the loo anyway. I totally forget to do these things when I'm in the zone." Before leaving the room, she skipped to Logan and gave him a loud smack on his cheek.

Which Rory _did_ hear, unfortunately.

How sorely tempted she was to quietly put the phone down. _Just hang up, Rory._ She did not realize how happy she had been in the last hour, until she became aware of it now being swallowed up in the black hole gaping in her chest. She had, in fact, put the phone down on her lap. It was as if Louisa had kissed her goodbye.

"Rory? Rory! Are you still there?" Logan was whispering loudly, worriedly.

She picked it up again. "Yes. I didn't realize it was time for lunch. I should get some, too." She strove for normalcy, as normal as lunch.

"Okay."

"Okay. Bye now."

"Rory—you know about the ski trip next weekend, right? David told you?" With Louisa now in the picture, the mention of David followed in rapid succession. They jostled and crowded in the phone.

"Oh right, yeah. He mentioned it to me."

"Are you coming?"

"I wasn't planning to. I don't relish the prospect of broken bones so soon after this." (My flu. My broken heart.) The prospect of the four of them being together for an entire weekend (to ski, at that) was nothing short of horrific to her.

_Damn. _He knew it. Logan ran his hand through his hair in inexplicable, deep frustration. He could hear the toilet flush; Louisa would soon be coming out.

"Please—please Rory, just go on the trip. Go skiing."

His words came out quickly, tripping over each other in a rush, running towards some unreachable solace, or away from a rabid pursuer.

"But I don't think I—"

"I want you to go. Please. I just want you to go."

The line went dead, Logan having shut the phone without knowing whether he had been able to persuade Rory. He meant to persuade her not to let this be their last time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Their first meeting in Milsom-street afforded much to be said, but the concert still more. That evening seemed to be made up of exquisite moments. The moment of her stepping forward in the octagon-room to speak to him, the moment of Mr. Elliot's appearing and tearing her away, and one or two subsequent moments, marked by returning hope or increasing despondence, were dwelt on with energy__. - Chapter XXIII_

"_Your manner might be only the ease which your engagement to another man would give. I left you in this belief; and yet--I was determined to see you again. My spirits rallied with the morning, and I felt that I had still a motive for remaining here.__" - F.W._


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N:** What to say? Except sorry, many times over, for the delay in posting a new chapter. And thank you, for continuing to wait, and ask for updates, and read, and re-read. If you think this a "filler" chapter, perhaps you're right. Giving you (and I) a chance to refresh the memory of this fic (go back to the beginning, now), and catch up again with Rory and Logan in earnest.

--

_Anne did not wish for more of such looks and speeches. His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything. Chapter VIII_

i.

Rory hardly ever slept in an airplane.

This he knew of her, from a 6-hour sojourn to London they once took (and from an intricately imagined 3-month sojourn to Asia that never was). For there was nothing quite like the infinite blackness or whiteness of open sky to serve as the backdrop of the latest novel she happened to be savoring in her strategically positioned window seat. Cloud formations and ruminations inspired her to construct and deconstruct her various lists ("To Do Today", "To Do Next Week", "Books to Read in the Next Six Months", and "Movies Watched in the Last Six Months (note: 3.5 stars and above)"). Every nasal, inaudibly muttered announcement over the speakers _(really, does anyone care how high they were above sea level?)_ compelled her to reach for her Frommer's in yet another thumb-through of the already colorfully highlighted pages.

Yet now, she slept. _Or did she?_ Logan's severely taxed peripheral vision could not quite tell, and Louisa and David and the stretch of an aisle between them did not help in his efforts to catch the blue of her eye. He shifted in his seat in abject frustration.

_Perhaps you should stop with the drinks, baby,_ Louisa had admonished irritatedly, handing his still-full glass to the flight attendant after his third trip to the lavatory in an hour. His intermittent passage across the aisle (periodically disrupting the ongoing conversations among their party) was his juvenile attempt to check on Rory, a chance to perhaps let drop casually over her headrest that there were some classic Woody Allens programmed in her video monitor. But it was only ever her hair, fallen halfway across her face as she leaned heavily against the window, that he saw.

Not once since her tardy, harried arrival on the Huntzberger's private tarmac—arms heavy with bags packed with needless skiing armory that she could have rented from the resort they would be ensconced in, stammering needless apologies about the rudeness of New York cab drivers and her usually unimpeachable promptness—not once had she looked at him.

He, on the other hand, had permitted himself a lingering look on her cheeks and nose flushed pink in the cold or in embarrassment, as David kissed her hair and assured her that she was only five minutes late (in fact, she was 15 minutes late). As she gamely bent to brush cheeks with Louisa, he permitted himself the small observation that she seemed to have lost weight in the two weeks since he last saw her, her chin looking more pointed than usual, and her gracefully hunched frame swallowed under a burgundy coat. He permitted himself a small measure of anticipation at their turn to greet each other, yet was rewarded with a decidedly neutral "Oh hey, Logan," and a glance thrown somewhere in the direction of the sky above him.

So this is how it is to be.

"Hey, Rory," he had said cooly in return.

She then turned to exchange more pleasantries with Amber and Hans, pumping their hands enthusiastically. Not one inch above ground, and already Logan wished he were back in his office and she in hers, where a "hey" spoken in hushed tones over the telephone meant much more than it did here and now.

"Hey, you," he had murmured over the phone the weekend before.

The small words belied the heavy days of forethought and inexplicable agony that led him to call the _Times_ office on a Sunday morning. Rory being Rory—indeed, gratefully, there she was.

"Hey!" she had responded breathlessly, after a brief moment of silence. "Log—is this Logan?" in a doubtful whisper.

"Yes it's me," he had whispered back conspiratorially. "And I agree, we must stop meeting like this."

"Hmm…our Sunday phone conversations are really throwing me off my routine. It is the odd, unexpected blip in my otherwise extremely jam-packed weekend."

"Oh yeah? And were you about to rush off somewhere?"

"Oh, just brunch with Carrie, Miranda, and Samantha," she had joked breezily. "And then actually, uh, I was about to go for my run at the park."

She had said this with some shyness. It was a late development in her that Logan did not know. This revelation was met with a pause so lengthy that Rory had wondered whether the line had been cut.

"Uh, Logan?"

"Sorry. I think I lost you for a minute there; I thought I heard you say that you were going to run."

"Shut up. I am going to run."

"Okay, whoever you are, let me try this one more time. May I please speak to Rory Gilmore? I believe you would find her at work on her desk even today, a Sunday. You might recognize her from the scent of coffee emanating from her carrel, if not her pores. Oh and by the way, she _doesn't_ run, unless it is to be 10 minutes early for a staff meeting."

"Just for that, Logan Huntzberger, I _am_ going to run."

"Ha! So you don't."

"I do, I swear! I've just been feeling ambivalent about it today. Right before you called."

"You've been feeling ambivalent about any form of physical exertion for the last, oh, 29 years, Rory."

"If you had any sympathetic nerve in your body which is, naturally, in peak form and in the pink of health from decades of exclusive gym memberships, you would remember that I had just come from the flu and therefore not in any condition to run nor be poked fun at in this way."

"Is 'in peak form and in the pink of health' an extremely roundabout way of saying that you think I have a hot body?" he had teased.

"Uh-huh. Same _ass_ as always."

"I think that impressive comeback is testimony of your fitness, Ror. I do remember you were sick, though, and that's the reason I called," he had explained then with seriousness. "How are you?"

"Oh. Well, I'm better now."

So much better, in fact, that she had a wide smile pasted on her face, the kind that would not be made less exuberant no matter how hard she reined in her facial muscles. "Thanks for asking. And yes, much credit goes to the humble, jet-puffed marshmallow. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has yet to be apprised of its healing properties."

"You must email him your written manuscript of the clinical trial, then," he had laughed, feeling genuinely lighter that she was better. "Or post it in the _Times_. I get full credit, naturally."

"I don't see why, since I introduced you to the wonders of the marshmallow. You were such a deprived child," Rory clucked.

"Yes, you did. And…thanks for that," he had said in an odd moment of sentimentality. She did open up his life to marshmallows, and other things besides.

"Oh. Well." She had felt flustered, and cleared her throat. "Marshmallows are great!"

"That they are. So…I'm glad you're better now, Rory."

There. The sole mission of his call had been fulfilled. But so tantalizing had been their banter, her small revelation about her current life (though he still hardly believed that she _ran_) that his determination to end the call at this point began to lose steam. What else has she been doing in the last week? In the last 7 years? Baking cookies _from scratch_? Taking up extreme sports? The last question brought to mind his other, more ulterior motive for calling.

"Better enough to go skiing next weekend, then?"

Logan thought he could hear the distant stirrings of her computer, perhaps a vacuum cleaner, as Rory had remained quiet on the line.

"You don't have to ski, of course, if you don't want to," he had amended, striving to sound casual. "But you might have to as proof that you had been running. You do have to show off your new levels of physical fitness to me, or your journalistic credibility is lost."

_Goad her, yes, and she will go._

"I already told you, Logan. I'm not going."

"Why?" he had asked, after a pause.

The question, so plaintive, startled them both. He neither planned nor expected to sound so vulnerable; she neither planned nor expected to offer up her painstakingly detailed pro-con list to his scrutiny. (The cons won out, of course).

"Well…uh…because. Because it seems…_weird_?"

How she had hated her lack of eloquence. _Because it would be too much for my heart to take, Logan,_ would have been more to the point. _I would see your arm around her shoulder, be witness to you kissing her. I might shatter._

There was also the more minor point of needing to break up with David, a task which her sympathetic heart had delayed, and which a weekend spent sharing a cup of hot cocoa or huddling under warm blankets would not aid.

"Weird, huh," Logan had parroted.

What Logan thought was _weird_ was that he seemed suddenly short of breath. As he heaved in some air, he sensed a long dormant undercurrent of black, seething emotion expanding from his gut to his throat. _You are up-set_, he recalled his second-grade summer camp counselor telling him in carefully enunciated syllables, after he inexplicably punched Colin McCrae's nose during the culminating family jamboree which his parents yet again neglected to attend.

_Do you know how many nights without sleep I have had, how many miles _I _have run? You drift back into my life after seven years, when I'm about to be married in two weeks, and now all I can see is you. And now you tell me I _cannotsee_ you!_

"But there's nothing to feel weird about, Rory," he had argued crisply. "I thought I made that clear with the package I sent you. New start. You're with David now, and I'm marrying Louisa in a few weeks. There's no need to think about our past at all. It was nothing, it was so long ago. So go with us, okay? And you should go, for David. He's been talking about nothing else to me and Louisa the past weeks. Do it for him, Rory. Don't overthink this situation, like you do everything else. I suppose it is…unusual, but don't make it out to be weirder than it should be."

Rory's heart was Colin McCrae's nose. He needed to break something, to crystallize the growing, intangible desperation with a series of untruths, greatest of which was that It was nothing, when it _was,_ and—if his sleepless nights revealed any insight at all—remains to _be_, Everything.

Rory had been shocked into chilly submission by his lengthy, audacious spiel. He had rightly presumed the source of her awkward and tender feelings: that what they once had might disturb their present, delicate arrangement; that what they once had was worth preserving from Monroes who might sully the memory. But she had presumed that he might understand and perhaps feel the same way. That he was so cavalier cowed her to humiliated silence.

"Fine, Logan. I'll go skiing," she had finally said. "Don't worry, there should be nothing, no weirdness at all."

Not granting him the chance to wound her further, Rory had placed the phone back on its cradle, before bending her head to her arms and pondering how they had gone from marshmallows to this.

Thus, at the advent of this weekend that was much hoped for (to Logan), and much feared (to Rory), _oh, hey _was all there was between them.

That, and her constantly averted eyes.

--

ii.

The snow was so fine and pristine it reflected the sky above it. Rory stared at it incomprehensibly at first, wondering at the blue snow. Nearby, the slopes seemed playful and gentle; further away, the peaks turned craggy and imposing in their height. Pressing her palm against the cold window glass, Rory thought she had never seen anything so beautifully stark. Everything appeared to resonate with her desolate heart.

Behind her was the murmur of voices as Logan and David checked into the hotel and as Louisa, Amber, and Hans spoke to the concierge about their planned activities for the next three days. Three days. How would she survive them? Even from a distance, Logan's voice surfaced, broke apart from the rest in a crescendo, and crashed clean over her in a frighteningly familiar wave. She can follow his voice wherever it drifted. _What time do the fresh tracks open?_, he was asking. (In the airplane, _can I have another glass of water?_) He sounded tired. Or not. He could be feeling invigorated and excited over this trip. She could no longer claim to know any better, especially when she had studiously avoided looking at his face.

It will be like this, then. She can do her best to be _not weird_,as instructed. But she would still hear his voice and breathe in the same thin air as he. This is how it would be, her blue-and-white beautiful, desolate, three days of hell.

"So, how do you like it?" David approached behind her.

Rory smiled wanly as she turned to face him. "Gorgeous. Well, as long as I ignore that head hanging on the wall," she said, glancing up at the doe-eyed face of a deer, "everything is perfect. In fact, this sofa is just begging me to curl up and read in her." She flopped down in the overstuffed, richly upholstered couch beside her and took in a better view of her surroundings.

At her feet were thick oriental rugs patterned in interesting curlicues that matched the gold flecks on the walls. There was a cheery fire below an ornate gilded mirror; the massive antique grandfather clock in the corner was flanked by similarly old bohemian lamps that evoked homey comforts in old-world, rich surroundings. The clincher, of course, was the stunning view of the Aspen mountains before her. She made a mental note to take lots of pictures for Ian (and for Lorelai, a foresworn photograph of Hugh Grant should he happen to be on holiday in this part of the world). Rory tried very hard not to think about what it cost to spend a night here. She was riddled with enough guilt for even allowing David to hold her hand.

"Only you would think of staying in and reading when there's 50 feet of snow outside," David grinned, sitting beside her.

"Yep, that's me." She curled her legs beneath her. "Born without an ounce of an adventurous spirit. Karma, I guess. The only reason I exist is because my mother was way too adventurous. She'd love to ski, too; she loves snow." Her voice could not mask its wistful tone. _Oh Mom, save me!_

"Hey, is everything alright?" David asked, turning his body to face her.

"Hot cocoa with marshmallows would be good, now that you ask. Do you think they would have such a concoction in this ramshackle establishment?"

"Rory," he shook his head, unconvinced. "You were quiet through most of the flight."

"I was sleeping."

She wasn't. She had simply closed her eyelids to spare herself the social obligation of conversing with her five companions, and (from the corner of her eye) the sight of Louisa's hand on Logan's jean-clad thigh. _Masochist_, she had berated herself, as she prayed for the sleep that never befell her, her ears alert to every shuffle and crumple of the newspaper in his hand, his every laugh and utterance grating over her already hypersensitive bones.

David continued to stare at her with his characteristic intensity that she supposed many a woman would think romantic, rather than discomfiting, as she did. His frank brown eyes bore holes in her head.

"There's so much I still don't know about you," he said suddenly, surprising her.

He started to reach for her hand, watching as Rory predictably folded her arms across her chest. She gave a small laugh, her fingers scratching at her turtleneck self-consciously.

"Like what about? There aren't many skeletons in my closet…oh, except I had a thing for Ricky Martin way back when he still sported a band across his forehead and was 5 feet tall. But you don't need to know that." As always, she chattered when she was nervous.

"Well," he hedged. "What of other boys—men—_post_-Ricky Martin? You haven't told me about them."

"Oh, I told you about Dean, and Jess," she said with nonchalance. "And Ben. And that's that. Really, the pickings have been quite slim, especially when one seems to hold a preference for monosyllabic names."

"If I recall correctly, Dean and Jess were in high school, and Ben a couple of years ago. Don't tell me you didn't have a—a serious relationship in college." He cocked his head, as if sizing her up. "You seem the type who would have a serious boyfriend in college," he decided.

"David," she began, looking askance at the other members of their group who were now walking to the front door, presumably to check on their cabins. She caught Logan's eye (quite by accident, caught off-guard as she was). She turned back to David and placed her hand carefully on his knee.

"Why are we even talking about this? What brought this on? I'm not sure this is the right time or place to tell you about my…er, love life. It would depress you too much, when we're supposed to be on holiday," she said lightly. No lie there, for indeed her love was inappropriate as well as depressing.

"Depressing? Oh I'm sure you broke a lot of hearts in your day, Rory. I'm sure you were _the_ co-ed in Yale. If I knew you then, I would…in fact, I heard that…" he stopped abruptly, coughing.

"What? What did you hear? From whom?" She hoped he would not decipher the rising panic in her voice.

"My mother—well, you know how those women talk. And she heard that…" He turned away from Rory now, folding his elbows on his knees and rubbing the smattering of golden stubble on his jaw as if to contemplate his next move.

Rory sat very still, frozen from the chill spreading through her limbs.

David finally blew out a huge sigh and reached behind Rory's neck, drawing her face close to kiss her mouth. His lips tasted of airplane coffee. She did not like it. "I'm just going to wait until you trust me enough to tell me yourself," he murmured against her nose. "Or...or I'm just going to force your shenanigans out of Logan," he added with a wicked grin.

Rory's eyes flew open in genuine alarm. "Wha…?" she gurgled.

"Gee, calm down Rory. Seems he was never sober enough to recall much about you. Much less who you went out with."

"He was hardly ever in our newsroom," Rory agreed emphatically, momentarily pacified, albeit slightly insulted by the suggestion that she couldn't have been anyone remarkable enough for Logan to remain sober for.

David stood up and stretched his long frame, offering his hand to Rory. "Shall we go check on our room? We can take a nap there, or…" his eyes lingered on the mouth he had just kissed. As he continued to stare at her, a slow flush crept up her face.

"I—I was planning to take a few pictures for Ian, actually. I might forget later on, and it's so pretty out now. Can you give me a few minutes?"

"Sure, Rory. Take your time."

He had become used to her withdrawal, the solitary moments she took that seemed essential for her to collect herself, prior to giving more of herself to him in conversation, in bed. She was hardly ever spontaneous. He had always attributed it to her natural shyness, and found it endearing, in fact, a refreshing change from the cloying aggessiveness of the women in his circle who were mostly enamored by his last name. Today, though, he found himself feeling on edge, impatient, at her reticence. As he walked the short distance out to their cabin, David wondered how much more to Rory there was, in actuality. Was she truly shy, or was she keeping something from him? Holding herself back on purpose? Was she being evasive, _by design_ to draw him in, to allure, to trap—

He stopped walking and shook his head abruptly, freeing it from the very words his mother had used to describe a Rory Gilmore he did not know nor believed existed. He liked Rory very much, enough to consider ending his lengthy, perpetually eligible bachelorhood for her. But having been burned many times before, he likewise valued the judgements of his mother who watched out for his interests with greater objectivity than his romantic head was known to have. _You're so easily blinded by love, or what you think is love,_ Louisa had often told him when he had his heart trampled on yet again.

He looked behind him to where he left Rory, and saw her through the glass windows not alone, but with Logan. They did not seem to be speaking, though, but merely standing together to look out to the imposing vista, their arms similarly crossed over their chests.

_(And Logan—whom she had dated, once—how much did he know about her?)_

David wished it weren't so—it was contrary to his uncomplicated, straightforward character—but this weekend is a test. A test of Rory's nature; of the extent to which she can trust him and he, her.

At least, it seemed to him that Logan was trying to draw her into their group. She was so hesitant to join their trip; so hesitant to expand their twosome to include his family and friends. Perhaps Logan could make her closer to Louisa and, by extension, closer to him as well. He made a mental note to later thank Logan for these gestures.

--

iii.

Logan surreptitiously observed their two heads bent close together in what seemed like a serious conversation. Perhaps, sensing that someone had been staring at her, she turned her head abruptly and—at long last—caught his eye for an infinitesmal second. But then turning away, she put her hand on David's knee. The small gesture felled him.

And then, David kisses her.

From the soupy maelstrom of mixed, undecipherable feelings that he had been drowning in for weeks, one realization emerged in sparkling clarity: he hated David Monroe. Unreasonably, perhaps, for David was the kind of person who is so unremarkable as to fail to inspire any strong emotion, much less hate. But there it was. (It was unfortunate, really, how he can spend his life despising men he hardly knew—the bartender who concocted kick-ass margaritas came to mind—all because they had touched her, laughed with her, at the times in her life she did not belong to him. How lucky the nameless, faceless men in the last 7 years for their continued anonymity. He cannot hate those he didn't know with as much heat as he now did David Monroe.)

Seeking to end the protracted restlessness he had been feeling since the _oh heys _exchanged at the tarmac, Logan threw caution to the wind and resolutely approached Rory when David left her alone. Louisa was occupied with her friends, but then again, he cared little what anyone might think at this point. _(He had not seen her in weeks, whereas David kissed her.)_ Rory continued to stare out the window, a slim silver camera fished out of her pocket hanging precariously from her listless fingers.

"Ansel Adams. You haven't lost the penchant for photographs, I see."

Rory gave him a sidelong glance, then turned again to look out at the landscape.

"You're mad at me," he said.

"No." She brought her camera up to her face and said, "I'm going to take some pictures now. Do you mind?"

"I know a spot with a more spectacular view. There's a balcony out; we're on a cliff, see." He took her elbow, intending to usher her out the back door, but she shrugged away from his touch.

"Logan—stop it."

"Stop what?" Mimicking her, he crossed his arms over his chest, stung as he was over her rejection of his touch.

"Don't make this, this…_weirder_ than it should be, right?"

"You _are_ mad at me. For a week now?"

"No, you were absolutely right to convince me. And here I am, enjoying the view."

She refused to move her eyes from a random faraway peak in front of her. Her throat felt dry and tight, not unlike when she was ill. First, the ordeal on the airplane. Next, David's interrogation. Now, Logan's hand at her elbow. She felt inclined to bury her hot face in the 50 feet of snow and suffocate to death, Coen brothers style.

"Why would what I said make you angry?" Logan plowed on. "_You_ said yourself weeks ago that it doesn't matter anymore—that it's not even worth telling David and Louisa about. Or—don't tell me—is this because I didn't believe you _ran_ around Central Park?"

"For the nth time, Logan. I'm. Not. Angry! Now why don't you run on back to Louisa. Go ski down a mountain or something. It seems she might fall apart without your arm to cling to," she muttered under her breath.

"Oh, that's rich. You won't even look at me!" he hissed, prompting her to look at him finally. "So why don't you go to your cabin with David, as he looks to be wanting to do more with you than just kiss!"

They stared at each other for endless seconds, the grandfather clock behind them ticking loudly, as would a timed bomb. As they contemplated each other's eyes at length—the first time in 7 years—she noticed how his brown was curiously flecked with greenish gold in the snow light, and tried to recall whether she had ever before seen this kaleidoscope. Whereas he observed the faint traces of lines and shadows surrounding her lush lashes, and wondered at how they gave her eyes a deeper hue, turning them more hauntingly grave. The bomb did not explode, but petered out to a sigh.

She broke the stand-off, looking down a fraction to his chest, to the fuzz of his green cashmere sweater. With some shock, she recognized it as an article of clothing from their time together.

"I'm sorry. This is weird," he surrendered, rubbing his eyes that felt strained from their unblinking exchange.

"Told you so."

"But you know—"

"What?" Still gazing at his sweater, she vaguely remembered having worn it herself during particularly cold nights in their apartment. It must be so soft now, a warm relic against his skin, after a thousand washings and wearings.

"Nothing. I'll leave you to take your pictures."

He left her there, afraid that if he stayed longer, there would be more impulsive words and hands, his fingers lingering not just at her elbow, but lifting to touch the shadows under her eyes.

--

_She saw him not far off. He saw her too; yet he looked grave, and seemed irresolute, and only by very slow degrees came at last near enough to speak to her. She felt that something must be the matter. The change was indubitable. The difference between the present air and what it had been in the octagon room was strikingly great.—Why was it?..._

_»__Is not this song worth staying for?" said Anne, suddenly struck by an idea which made her yet more anxious to be encouraging._

"_No!" he replied, impressively, "there is nothing worth my staying for;" and he was gone directly._

_ Chapter XX_


End file.
